Bruccoli, Matthew J. (Matthew Joseph), 1931-2008

Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (August 21, 1931 – June 4, 2008) was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was the preeminent expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote about other writers, notably Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary 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. In 1960, he received a PhD in English literature studies from the University of Virginia, where he was supervised by Fredson Bowers.

Bruccoli's interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald began in 1947 when he heard a radio broadcast of Fitzgerald's short story "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". That week he tracked down a copy of The Great Gatsby, "and I have been reading it ever since," he told interviewers. Bruccoli taught at the University of Virginia and the Ohio State University early in his career. He settled at the University of South Carolina, where he earned tenure and taught for four decades. He lived in Columbia, South Carolina.

Over the course of his career, Bruccoli wrote more than 50 critical 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. He edited many of Fitzgerald's works, from This Side of Paradise to Fitzgerald's unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon. It had first been published posthumously in 1941. Edited by Bruccoli, it was published in a new version in 1993 as The Love of the Last Tycoon, part of a collection by Cambridge University Press. Bruccoli also edited Zelda Fitzgerald's only novel Save Me the Waltz; she was married to Scott.

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