Matthew Bruccoli

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Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (August 21, 1931 – June 4, 2008^[1]^[2]) was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was the preeminent expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote scholarship on writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

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"The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"

Bruccoli's interest in Fitzgerald began in 1947 when he heard a radio broadcast of Fitzgerald's short story "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz."^[2]^[3] That week he tracked down a copy of The Great Gatsby, "and I have been reading it ever since," he told interviewers.^[2]

Bruccoli graduated from Yale University in 1953 and attained a Master's degree and doctorate from the University of Virginia in 1960. Bruccoli, who also taught at the University of Virginia and the Ohio State University, spent nearly four decades teaching at the University of South Carolina.^[2] He lived in Columbia, South Carolina.^[2] Over the course of his career, he authored over 50 books on F. Scott Fitzgerald and other literary figures. His 1981 biography of Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is considered the standard Fitzgerald biography.^[2] He has edited many of Fitzgerald's works, from This Side of Paradise to Fitzgerald's unfinished final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. Bruccoli has also edited Scott's wife Zelda Fitzgerald's only novel Save Me the Waltz.

While studying Fitzgerald, Bruccoli and his wife Arlyn began to collect all manner of Fitzgerald memorabilia. Bruccoli even owned the original of Celestial Eyes, the original cover art by Francis Cugat which appeared on the first edition, and most modern editions, of The Great Gatsby. In 1969, Bruccoli befriended F. Scott and Zelda's daughter Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald. In 1976, Bruccoli and the Fitzgeralds' daughter Scottie (as Scottie Fitzgerald Smith) published The Romantic Egoists, from the scrapbooks that F. Scott and Zelda had maintained throughout their lives of photographs and book reviews. Later in life Bruccoli and his wife donated their collection to the Thomas Cooper Library at USC. The collection is valued at nearly $2 million.^[1]

Along with Dashiell Hammett scholar Richard Layman and businessman C.E. Frazer Clark Jr., Bruccoli launched the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The 400-volume reference work contains biographies of more than 12,000 literary figures from antiquity to modern times. He continued working at the university until being diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2008.^[2]