On this day...

Harvard College is named after clergyman John Harvard in 1639. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the college is Harvard University's oldest school, and is run by the Faculty of Arts and Science. As such, the institution boasts a number of famous literary alumni. William S. Burroughs, T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Norman Mailer, Erich Segal, Michael Crichton and John Updike all received their education at the esteemed college and, alongside several Presidents, have contributed much to its reputation.

Harvard is also famous for its well known publications. The 'Harvard Advocate' is the oldest continuously published college literary magazine, and the 'Harvard International Review', is one of the most widely-distributed undergraduate journals in the world with 35,000 readers in more than 70 countries.

Love Story comes to an end...

Erich Segal, died on Sunday at the age of 72. The author, who had suffered from Parkinson's disease for many years, had a heart attack at his London home. Segal will be best known for his work 'Love Story', which he wrote while a Classics professor at Yale University. Becoming a New York Times bestseller, the novel was the topselling work of fiction for 1970 in the United States, and has been translated in 33 languages. Complete with tag line, 'Love means never having to say you're sorry', the book was turned into a Oscar winning film of the same name, starring Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw. Segal also wrote the screenplay for The Beatles' 'Yellow Submarine'. In a eulogy delivered at his funeral, his daughter said; 'That he 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'.