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 the preeminent expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote about writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Matthew Joseph Bruccoli was born in 1931 into an ethnic Italian family in The Bronx, New York. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1949. He studied at Cornell University, where one of his professors was noted Russian author Vladimir Nabokov, and at Yale University. There he was a founding member of the fledgling Manuscript Society, graduating in 1953. He completed graduate work in English at the University of Virginia, earning a master's degree and doctorate in 1960.

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, where, according to his New York Times obituary, he "cut a dash on campus, instantly recognizable by his vintage red Mercedes convertible, Brooks Brothers suits, Groucho mustache and bristling crew cut that dated to his Yale days. His untamed Bronx accent also set him apart."

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