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Erich Segal in 1971./Yale Manuscripts & Archives photo

Erich Segal, the former Yale classics professor and author of such scholarly works as The Death of Comedy and Roman Laughter, died January 17 at age 72.

Segal was better known for his bestselling 1970 novel, Love Story, and the Ryan O’Neal/Ali MacGraw movie of the same name. Derided by critics but beloved by readers, Love Story told of a student at Segal’s alma mater, Harvard, who married his working-class lover over the objections of his blueblood family, only to watch her die of cancer.

Segal’s mass popularity damaged his academic career. In 1972 Yale denied him tenure, instead making him a senior lecturer. His department chairman noted to the New York Times that “he does other things besides teach classical literature.”

Also that year, Segal complained to the Harvard Crimson that Love Story’s phenomenal success had transformed his reputation at Yale from brilliant, idiosyncratic classics lecturer (”Erich Segal does for Latin what Christ did for Lazarus”) to arrogant showboat:

“The very things I was doing before I went electronic were the very things that hung me, (like) the fact that I used to come into class at Yale with one note card. They would think ‘one card–the bastard hasn’t prepared!’ In truth I had memorized almost everything.”

“It was the difference between knowing a Beatle” — Segal co-wrote the screenplay for Yellow Submarine – “and being one,” he said. “How would you feel about Ringo teaching Latin 112?”

But Segal did motivate at least one Yale student to reach for the stars:

“Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau, who almost never speaks in public, told a packed Sprague Hall that the inspiration to try to go commercial with his comic strip, which was then called “Bull Tales” and was running in the Yale Daily News, came from the success his tutor Erich Segal had with Love Story. “I took a look at my own work, which was about equally shallow, self-involved preppies, and said, hey, I’ve got a business model,” Trudeau explained.