Matthew Bruccoli, preeminent F. Scott Fitgerald scholar, dies

Dr. Matthew J. Bruccoli, the Emily Jeffries Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English, died Wednesday, June 4, in Columbia.

Considered the world’s foremost scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bruccoli was known for his unflagging devotion to the university and a sometimes irascible temperament that belied a warmth and gentlemanly nature, particularly toward devotees of American literature.

In 1994, the university’s Thomas Cooper Library made international headlines with the acquisition of the Matthew J. & Arlyn F. Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which contains more than 3,000 books and periodical publications by and about the author, more than 100 of his letters and copies of his screenplays.

Bruccoli wryly told The New York Times that he parted with the collection because he couldn’t get a coffin large enough to hold him and his books.

The Bruccoli Fitzgerald archive, appraised at $2 million, is considered the most comprehensive in the world. In the intervening years, it, has become a major resource for scholarly researchers and helped draw other noteworthy collections, including The Speiser and Easterling-Hallman Foundation Collection of Ernest Hemingway.

In addition to teaching and conducting research, Bruccoli was president of Bruccoli Clark Layman, a Columbia-based publishing company that produces reference works in literary and social history.

Company vice president Richard Layman said that Bruccoli wrote or edited more than 100 books, and he considered his crowning achievement to be the Dictionary of Literary Biography, which comprises more than 400 volumes of professional biographies of writers in all languages from antiquity to the present.

Layman said it has been called “the best overall literary reference work ever published.”

Bruccoli also was a key figure in organizing literary events at the university and is generally credited with bringing eminent speakers such as George Plimpton, Joseph Heller, William Styron and others to campus.

Bruccoli joined the university in July 1969 and officially retired in December 2006, although he continued to conduct research and teach in various capacities until he became ill this spring.

University President Andrew Sorensen praised Bruccoli for his dedication to the university.

“Dr. Matthew Bruccoli was a university treasure who enriched the lives of so many on our campus and beyond,” he said. “While we like to think of him as our treasure, he belonged to the larger world of international scholarship and publishing and was as comfortable in the rare-book stores of New York and London as he was in the classroom and in our Thomas Cooper Library. He will be remembered for his unswerving dedication to the University of South Carolina and to the library, his passion for Fitzgerald, Hemingway and their contemporaries in American literature, and his contributions to advancing the understanding of the profession of authorship.”

After graduating from the Bronx School of Science in 1949, Bruccoli earned his bachelor’s degree from Yale (1953) and his doctorate from the University of Virginia (1961).

He is survived by his wife, Arlyn, daughters, Mary of New York, Josephine Owens of San Francisco and Lyn of Vermont, and son, Joseph, of Columbia. A private family service and burial will take place June 11 in New York State.