“Funny, touching and infused with wonder, as all love stories should be.”— San Francisco Examiner The basis for the 1970 film starring Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw, Erich Segal's  Love Story  is an enduring classic that has captured hearts for almost 50 years. It is the story of Oliver Barrett IV, a rich jock from a stuffy WASP family on his way to a Harvard degree and a career in law, and Jenny Cavilleri, a wisecracking working-class beauty studying music at Radcliffe. Oliver and Jenny - kindred spirits from different worlds - meet, talk, question, answer and fall for each other so deeply that no one, themselves included, can understand it. So instead of trying to understand it, they accept it and live it as best they can. This is their story - a story of two young people and a love so uncompromising it will bring joy to your heat and tears to your eyes. It is the story that told the world, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” “Not just a story― Love Story is an experience. The reader who responds to this little book will feel less like a reader than an unwritten Segal character, living it all out from the inside … In this ‘love story’ you are not just an observer.” ( Christian Science Monitor ) “For someone who is in love, or was in love, or hopes to be in love.” ( St. Louis Post-Dispatch ) “Funny, touching and infused with wonder, as all love stories should be.” ( San Francisco Examiner ) “It’s incredible...A poignant of novel of nostalgia and romance.” (Washington Post) “This is a tender and revealing and moving book with open language and the irreverence, the humor, the commitment.” (Cleveland Plain Dealer) “It is entertaining, fast paced, witty...but in the end, touching and sincere.” ( St. Louis Globe Democrat ) “If your emotions still are available to vibrate, here is a story that will shake you up...It is full of humor that sometimes tickles and sometimes stings.” (Associated Press) “The most poignant romance that Journal editors have read in a year’s time.” ( Ladies’ Home Journal ) “A very simple, immensely appealing love story...” (Publishers Weekly) The Phenomenal National Bestseller and Enduring Classic He is Oliver Barett IV, a rich jock from a stuffy WASP family on his way to a Harvard degree and a career in law. She is Jenny Cavilleri, a wisecracking working-class beauty studying music at Radcliffe. Opposites in nearly every way, Oliver and Jenny immediately attract, sharing a love that defies everything ... yet will end too soon. Here is a love that will linger in your heart now and forever. Erich Segal's first three novels, Love Story, Oliver's Story, and Man, Woman and Child, were all international bestsellers and became major motion pictures. His fourth novel, The Class, was a New York Times bestseller and won literary prizes in both France and Italy. Segal is also the author of Doctors and  Acts of Faith and Prizes. FRANCESCA SEGAL was born in London in 1980 and studied at Oxford before becoming a journalist and writer. Her work has appeared in Granta , Newsweek , The Guardian (U.K.), Financial Times and Vogue (U.K. and U.S.), amongst many other publications. She has been a features writer at Tatler , and for three years she wrote the Debut Fiction column in The Observer (U.K.). WEB: FRANCESCASEGAL.COM TWITTER: @FRANCESCASEGAL FACEBOOK: FRANCESCA-SEGAL Love Story By Segal, Erich Perennial ISBN: 0060748095 Chapter One What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me. Once, when she specifically lumped me with those musical types, I asked her what the order was, and she replied, smiling, ?Alphabetical.? At the time I smiled too. But now I sit and wonder whether she was listing me by my first name -- in which case I would trail Mozart -- or by my last name, in which case I would edge in there between Bach and the Beatles. Either way I don't come first, which for some stupid reason bothers hell out of me, having grown up with the notion that I always had to be number one. Family heritage, don't you know? In the fall of my senior year, I got into the habit of studying at the Radcliffe library. Not just to eye the cheese, although I admit that I liked to look. The place was quiet, nobody knew me, and the reserve books were less in demand. The day before one of my history hour exams, I still hadn't gotten around to reading the first book on the list, an endemic Harvard disease. I ambled over to the reserve desk to get one of the tomes that would bail me out on the morrow. There were two girls working there. One a tall tennis-anyone type, the other a bespectacled mouse type. I opted for Minnie Four-Eyes. ?Do you have The Waning of the Middle Ages?? She shot a glance up at me. ?Do you have your own library?? she asked. ?Listen, Harvard is allo