Friday, July 11, 2008

Erich Wolf Segal (1937)

Erich Wolf Segal (born June 16, 1937 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American author, screenwriter, and educator.


The son of a rabbi, Segal attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn and traveled to Switzerland to take summer courses. He attended Harvard University, graduating as both the class poet and Latin salutatorian in 1958, after which he obtained his master's degree and a doctorate.

He was a professor of Greek and Latin literature at Harvard University, Yale University and Princeton University. He now is teaching at Wolfson College, Oxford.

works

Yellow Submarine

In 1967, from the story by Lee Minoff, he wrote the screenplay for The Beatles 1968 motion picture, Yellow Submarine.

Love Story

In the late 1960s, Segal collaborated on other screenplays, and also had written a synthetic romantic story by himself about a Harvard and a Radcliffe student, but failed to sell it. However, literary agent Lois Wallace at the William Morris Agency suggested he turn the script into a novel and the result was a literary and motion picture phenomenon called Love Story. A New York Times No. 1 bestseller, the book became the top selling work of fiction for all of 1970 in the United States, and was translated into more than 20 languages worldwide. The motion picture of the same name was the number one box office attraction of 1971.

Erich Segal went on to write more novels and screenplays, including the 1977 sequel to Love Story, called Oliver's Story.


He has published a number of scholarly works as well as teaching at the university level. He has acted as a visiting professor for the University of Munich, Princeton University, and Dartmouth College. He has written widely on Greek and Latin literature. His novel The Class (1985), a saga based on the Harvard Class of 1958, was also a bestseller, and also won literary honour in France and Italy [citation needed]. Doctors was another New York Times bestseller from Segal.


Click Here to download works by Erich Wolf Segal

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