Books come in all forms, from high to low. And few writers were more aware of that high-low divide than Erich Segal, who died Sunday in London at age 72. A classics professor at some of the world’s finest universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford), Segal also happened to produce a number of best-selling pot-boilers.
Most notably, he wrote the 1970 novel Love Story, the sappy and sentimental story of a star-crossed romance between a well-to-do Harvard student and a Radcliffe scholarship student that ends in tragedy shortly after their marriage. (Depending on the account you read, the Oliver Barrett character may have been based in part on former Vice President Al Gore, who was a golden-boy Harvard undergrad when Segal was a visiting professor in the ’60s.)
Love Story‘s phenomenal success was bolstered by an equally maudlin hit movie starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw that was released just 10 months after the book’s Valentine’s Day publication (and based on a script by Segal himself). Likewise, both versions of the story were boosted by a catchphrase — “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” — that became a signature expression of a distinctly ’70s-style approach to romance. The phrase was widely quoted — and perhaps even more widely parodied, in everything from Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 film What’s Up, Doc? (when O’Neal himself dismisses the line as “the dumbest thing I ever heard” to costar Barbra Streisand) to The Simpsons to Rugrats to a Cobra Starship song (“Being From Jersey Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry”). The line was also tweaked by John Lennon — “Love means never having to say you’re sorry every 15 minutes” — which is fitting, since Segal also co-wrote the famed 1968 Beatles movie Yellow Submarine.
Still, it is for Love Story that Segal is most likely to be remembered. Segal later wrote a sequel, Oliver’s Story, as well as other melodramatic best-sellers like The Class (about five Harvard classmates from the ’50s) and Doctors (about med school classmates). For a while, Segal established himself as the Nicholas Sparks of his era — all while maintaining his credibility in the academic world and churning out scholarly volumes on Caesar Augustus and the Roman playwright Plautus. (To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Sparks is not moonlighting as an expert in astrophysics.) Like Sparks, et al, Segal’s fiction may not have ranked as great literature, and yet his books were compelling page-turners with the tug of the familiar narrative forms.
If William Shakespeare were around today it’s unclear whether he’d have made it as a playwright. My guess is that he’d probably be credited as “Will Shakes,” and would be penning Off-Off-Broadway plays about the Iraq War and submitting spec scripts to Mad Men. So it’s lucky for us that he lived when he lived.
If you’re planning to host a Halloween dinner this weekend and sell tickets online, you might want to check with your lawyers first. A Harry Potter fan in the U.K. who calls herself Ms. Marmite Lover was planning to host Potter-themed dinners this Saturday and Sunday — complete with butterbeer, pumpkin pasties, and Dumbledore’s favorite sweets (mint humbugs and sherbet lemons) — until she received a cease-and-desist letter last Friday from Warner Bros. suggesting that her “proposed use of the Harry Potter properties…without our consent would amount to an infringement of Warner’s rights,” 
Now that Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are suggests that the primary audience for movies based on children’s books may not be kids at all, how long before we see something like this? (A hat tip to the 
s weekend saw the release, and box-office success, of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, an animated adaptation of the much-beloved children’s book about precipitation alla Bolognese. You may wonder how they managed an entire feature-length film out of this straightforward and pretty slender storybook. Well, in a way, they didn’t. The filmmakers have padded out the story to include an absent-minded inventor whose experiments lead to the titular weather patterns, his love interest, a perky weather girl, a maniacal machine bent on destruction, and Mr. T as a cop.
