Love Story Author, Erich Segal, Dead at 72

The creator of the iconic 1970s book and film has died almost exactly 40 years Love Story’s debut. According to The New York Times, Erich Segal, who had suffered with Parkinson’s disease for 25 years, died of a heart attack at home in London on the 17th of January.

At his funeral, his daughter, the writer Francesca Segal, delivered a eulogy in which she said her father had “fought to breathe, fought to live, every second of the last 30 years of illness with such mind-blowing obduracy, is a testament to the core of who he was -- a blind obsessionality that saw him pursue his teaching, his writing, his running and my mother, with just the same tenacity. He was the most dogged man any of us will ever know.”

From The Guardian:

Segal wrote the bestselling book about love and bereavement, which became a chart-topping film, in 1969 when he was 32 and a classics professor at Harvard. As its most famous line, "love means never having to say you're sorry", entered popular culture, Segal became a celebrity and regular on TV shows, as well as a commentator on the Olympic games for the ABC network.