Matthew J. Bruccoli

Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (August 21, 1931 – June 4, 2008) was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was an expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald; his biography of Fitzgerald, published in 1981, was considered the standard biography for decades. He also wrote about other writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Early life and education Matthew Joseph Bruccoli was born in 1931 in The Bronx, New York to Joseph Bruccoli and Mary Gervasi. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1949. He studied at Cornell University, where one of his professors was the noted author Vladimir Nabokov, and at Yale University. On campus, he was a founding member of the fledgling Manuscript Society, graduating in 1953. That week he tracked down a copy of The Great Gatsby, he told interviewers, "and I have been reading it ever since." In 1983, Bruccoli published Ross Macdonald / Kenneth Millar: A Descriptive Bibliography in the Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography.

Along with Layman, who became recognized as a Dashiell Hammett scholar, 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. In 1962, the firm of Bruccoli Clark Layman was formed to design and publish books. One of the books it produced was A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts 1920-1936, published in 1986. It contained photographs printed from glass negatives discovered under the Roberts house in Columbia though the work of University of South Carolina South Caroliniana Library field archivist Thomas L. Johnson with the cooperation of the Roberts family. A True Likeness won Johnson and co-author Philip C. Dunn the 1987 Lillian Smith Book Award.

Among the glass negatives found under the house was one of a young Modjeska Monteith Simkins. During the preservation of the Modjeska Monteith Simkins House, Catherine Fleming Bruce worked with Bruccoli for permission to have a portrait of Simkins created directly from the glass plates, for display in the Simkins House.

Personal life Bruccoli married Arlyn Firkins on October 5, 1957. They had four children: Mary, Joseph, Josephine Owens, and Arlyn Bruccoli.

Death Bruccoli continued working at the University of South Carolina until being diagnosed with a brain tumor. He died on June 4, 2008.

Selected works