Segal, who is single, lives in a suite that was last occupied by a Fellow, his wife and their two children. Segal needs every foot of the space-he simultaneously teaches three courses at Yale, meets a harried speaking schedule, edits motion pictures, and writes.

Segal is ecstatic with his constant activity. At present, he is trying to finish The Death of Comedy, a comparison of classical and modern drama.

"I owe somebody something here at Yale after my ego trip with 'Love Story,'" Segal explained. Surely, his recent notoriety has resulted primarily from that novel, a short, unimposing book about a Harvard jock-scholar and his Radcliffe sweetheart who dies at age 25.

Sunday, "Love Story" headed the best-seller list for the 29th consecutive week, a new record. And yesterday, the largest single printing since the invention of moving type-4.5 million copies of "Love Story" in paperback-became available for public consumption.

"'Love Story,'" said Segal, "is an amalgam of truths. It's almost all true."

The idea for the book came from several Yalies at the Harvard Law School who visited Segal on Thanks-giving two years ago while he was living in Dunster House on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

They told Segal of a classmate whose wife had recently died, and that she had supported him while he completed graduate school. "When they left, I was struck by how the guy could ever have a relationship again considering when she died and how."

Segal built his story around what his Yale friends had told him, drawing on his years at Harvard, and he wrote the book that winter in Dunster.

Among other things, Segal said, "Love Story" is "a distillation of four years of road trips to Dartmouth with the hockey team, listening to them talk about size and eating and so many things that don't occur to other people."

It is about Jenny ("she's like a girl I went with once") and Oliver Barrett IV ("who closely resembles a friend of mine at Harvard").

"'Love Story' is really a little valentine to some friends at Harvard," Segal said. "I never expected it to be so successful. That it got published in the first place surprised me.

"There was nothing in the balance for me. If it was no good, what the hell? If it was published, it would implement my income."

That has turned out to be a mild understatement. Segal has made enough money from the book, which has been translated into 20 languages thus far, to retire "several times over."

Some of his colleagues at Yale have even suggested that he endow a library of comparative literature.

The response to "Love Story" has been unusually good, except in England where the London Times called it "the death of the novel." "I was critically damned in England," Segal said. "I mean I was trampled." Nonetheless, the book sold widely.