Word: segal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That he likes bad characters, bad plots, and bad endings? It doesn't seem fair to criticize Erich Segal '58 for making a buck the easiest way he knows how. After all, he would probably be the first to admit the slick vapidness of his "novels." Because, of course, they are not novels...
...Erich Segal...
Europe as the seducer of American innocence is a theme that has played well at all levels of U.S. fiction, from Hawthorne's The Marble Faun to Erich Segal's latest love story, Man, Woman and Child. As usual, Segal's principal characters are bright, attractive and preppie. Bob Beckwith, Yale '59, is an esteemed professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His wife Sheila, Vassar '60, is a highly valued editor at a university press. The marriage is an ideal balance of temperaments, love, devotion, respect and affection. There are two blossoming...
This is the sort of setup that tempts jealous gods and novelists. What will it be this time: brain tumor? Hodgkin's disease? coronary bypass? Segal has something more imaginative in mind. In 1968 Husband Bob attended a conference in the south of France. The country was gripped by unrest, and he managed to get his head in the way of a policeman's cosh. First aid was administered by a beautiful female physician who then prescribed house calls. What patient could resist such doctor's orders...
...quibble? The time has long passed when it was amusing to use Erich Segal for bayonet practice. The boy from Brooklyn, N.Y., who became an Ivy League classics professor and bestselling author, tells a good story, or rather he pictures one. His narrative technique is more cinematic than literary. In addition, Love Story and its sequel Oliver's Story owed their popularity to one of Hollywood's most successful formulas. Like the old immigrant movie moguls, Segal has a shrewd instinct for providing audiences with idealizations of America's traditional affluent classes. There can be trouble...