Segal’s Nightmare.

The tale of classicist Erich Segal’s popular rise and professional fall in relation to the wild success of Love Story was very well known back in the day, half a century ago, but I suspect it’s been forgotten by now; at any rate, it’s well told by Beth Blum in the Chronicle (archived): Love Story presents the unusual case of a work written first as a screenplay and only later as a novel. Paramount Pictures asked its author, Erich Segal, to produce a paperback to be released on Valentine’s Day 1970, to help preview and promote the film before its Christmas debut. The son of a respected Brooklyn rabbi, Segal went to college at Harvard, where he studied classics, graduating as class poet and class orator in 1958. […] His sophomoric dream became his professorial nightmare. Love Story is not only about doomed romance. It is also about the university, a setting with which Segal was preoccupied — even enamored — throughout his rocky academic life. Segal’s literary oeuvre presents a…

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