But what lies beneath that fear is the terror of insignificance. A line in one of his novels, The Class, described both of us: “Fear of death is universal. Both of us were mediocre runners trying to prove ourselves. None has appeared on The Times’s best-seller list.Erich Segal was on the track team with me at Harvard and ran the Boston Marathon with me several times. His other books include “Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism” (Harper & Row, 1983) “Oxford Readings in Aristophanes” (Oxford University, 1996) and “Oxford Readings in Menander, Plautus, and Terence” (Oxford University, 2001), all of which he edited.
Segal is survived by his wife, the former Karen James two daughters, Francesca Segal and Miranda Segal, both of London his mother, Cynthia Zeger of Manhattan and two brothers, David, of Manhattan, and Thomas, of Baltimore. “It takes the average person an hour and a half to read the book,” he told The New York Times in December 1970. It was.īut if critics found his novel insufficiently weighty, Mr. In early 1971, after “Love Story” was submitted for consideration for a National Book Award, the fiction jury threatened to resign in a body unless the novel was removed from contention. “The banality of ‘Love Story’ makes ‘Peyton Place’ look like ‘Swann’s Way’ as it skips from cliché to cliché with an abandon that would chill even the blood of a True Romance editor,” Newsweek wrote.
While millions of readers swooned, most reviewers harrumphed. Segal also wrote “The Death of Comedy” (Harvard University, 2001), a well-received survey of Western comic drama from antiquity to modernity. Segal’s writing credits ranged from the screenplay for the animated Beatles movie “Yellow Submarine” (1968), on which he collaborated with several other writers to “Roman Laughter” (Harvard University, 1968), a study of the playwright Plautus that was widely considered seminal to the book and lyrics for “Sing Muse!” (1961), a musical version of the Helen of Troy story that ran for 39 performances Off Broadway.Īmong his other novels are “Oliver’s Story” (Harper & Row, 1977), which continues the tale of Oliver Barrett “The Class” (Bantam, 1985) “Doctors” (Bantam, 1988) “Acts of Faith” (Bantam, 1992) and “Only Love” (Putnam, 1997). Gore in the late 1960s, when they were students at Harvard and he was there on sabbatical.īefore “Love Story,” Mr. He did say that he had modeled Oliver’s freighted relationship with his father on the Gore family. Segal set the record straight: Oliver, he said, was mainly a youthful incarnation of the actor Tommy Lee Jones.
0 kommentar(er)
