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Some Sort of Epic Life: Remembering Matt Bruccoli
June 5, 2008
It’s a hell of a thing getting an email telling you that an old friend has passed away, but I found exactly that waiting for me this morning when logging on to my PC. It was three short sentences saying that Matt Bruccoli had died at home with his family June 4. I learned recently that he’d been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and 
suspected he wouldn’t last longer than a few months, but it was a shock.
It’s a great loss for literature, not only was Matt the Fitzgerald and Hemingway scholar extraordinaire, but also was an expert on more writers than you can name. Matthew no doubt was the 20th century’s leading American scholar. His life-long romance with literature fueled both his work as the Jeffries professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina and his publishing business, Bruccoli, Clark, Layman (the Layman is Richard Layman, the top Dashiell Hammett scholar, also a great guy). In addition to his writing dozens of scholarly books on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others 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, nothing else can touch it. It’s a fitting monument to leave behind him.
He owned the personal libraries of several top writers, and his collection of all things Scott Fitzgerald is unparalleled. Matt loved books and libraries and championed USC’s superb Thomas Cooper Library, helping it acquire one remarkable collection after another.
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, Michael Reynolds, and others. He was a great guy to be with if you’re a book head. 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. He always had book projects cooking and would ask my advice on whether the idea was sound or if libraries would be interested.
We talked often about libraries. Matt spent lots of time in them and was very old school, once telling a gathering of librarians that a library is room full 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), in my office drawer. 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, Macdonald…, so I’ll be thinking of you often. All those writers were lucky to have you. And so were we.
Goodbye, pal.
Posted by Michael Rogers on June 5, 2008 | Comments (1)
