Segal had known Al Gore and his Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones, in 1968 and drew on their lives for the

'Love Story' author Erich Segal dies at 72:

'via Blog this'


"Love Story" was based on the college romance between Al and Tipper Gore. He did acknowledge that he had known Al Gore and his Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones, in 1968 and drew on their lives for the central male character of "Love Story," Oliver Barrett IV 
He had originally written "Love Story" as a screenplay about the star-crossed love between a working-class Italian girl from Radcliffe and a Harvard boy from an old family. The 1970 film, which starred Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal and became a huge hit, was in production before Mr. Segal reworked it as a novel. When "Love Story" was released in paperback, it had the largest print order in the publishing history at the time, with 4,325,000 copies.

Although Mr. Segal's work resonated with the public, critics almost uniformly lambasted it. The judges for the National Book Award threatened to resign unless "Love Story" was withdrawn from nomination.

"It is a banal book which simply doesn't qualify as literature," said novelist William Styron, the head judge of the fiction panel. "Simply by being on the list it would have demeaned the other books."