Erich Segal

Erich Segal taught Greek and Latin literature at Yale, Harvard and Princeton and held a fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford, a career that ran alongside Love Story, the 1970 novel that topped the American bestseller lists and went into thirty-three languages. Born in Brooklyn in 1937, a rabbi's son, he took his degrees at Harvard, where he was class poet and Latin salutatorian, and finished a doctorate in comparative literature in 1965. He had a hand in the screenplay for the Beatles film Yellow Submarine. Man, Woman, and Child, published in 1981, was the one he called his entry as a serious novelist; a film version followed in 1983. Segal ran the Boston Marathon almost every year from 1955 to 1975 and covered the Olympic marathons of 1972 and 1976 for American television, catching the impostor who entered the Munich stadium ahead of Frank Shorter. He had Parkinson's disease and died in London in 2010, aged 72.