Good-Bye, Matt Bruccoli

It's a hell of a thing getting an email telling you that an old friend has passed away. But there they were, three short sentences saying that Matt Bruccoli had died of an inoperable brain tumor June 4.

It's a great loss for literature. Matt was no doubt the 20th century's leading American scholar on F. Scott Fitzgerald. In addition to writing dozens of scholarly books on Hemingway and Fitzgerald (including the Fitzgerald biography Some Sort of Epic Grandeur), Matt was the driving force behind the Dictionary of Literary Biography, which at more than 400 volumes is hands down the greatest literary reference work ever produced.

Matt knew everybody, from top writers to publishing people to other scholars and cheap critics like me, who formed what I've always called the "Bruccoli Mafia." Through him I met John Updike, Budd Schulberg, James Dickey, Joseph Heller, George Plimpton, Honoria Murphy, and Michael Reynolds. He visited New York several times a year, and sometimes I was part of a gathering with literary gods, but most often it was just the two of us hooking up for a meal or a drink.

We talked often about libraries. Matt spent a lot of time in them and was very old school, once telling a gathering of librarians that a library is roomful of books, not computer screens. You can imagine how well that went over with the audience, but he truly believed it and not because he was anti-technology, but because books were most sacred to him.We wrote letters to each other rather than phoning, and I have reams of his, written in pencil on yellow legal pad paper (his penmanship is even worse than mine, which is saying something). I think they're going to be important and will inspire future scholars, so his work will go on.

Matt, you were an original; there never will be another one like you. You were a great teacher, and I learned a lot from our encounters. I'll miss you and am proud to have been friends for 17 years. I'll think of you every time I read Fitzgerald, Hemingway, O'Hara, Chandler, and Macdonald, so I'll be thinking of you often.