• Taught at the University of South Carolina for 40 years
• Created Dictionary of Literary Biography
• Aided USC’s Thomas Cooper Library attain rare collections

Matthew J. Bruccoli, the foremost American literature scholar and biographer of F. Scott Fitzgerald, died at home with his family June 4 from a brain tumor. He was 76. In addition to writing more than 50 scholarly books on a plethora of American authors, including Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, the leading biography on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bruccoli was the Emily Brown Jefferies distinguished professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, where he taught for 40 years, and a founder of Bruccoli Clark Layman publishers. Bruccoli also created the venerable 400-plus volume Dictionary of Literary Biography, distributed by Gale. A paladin of libraries, Bruccoli was paramount in helping USC’s Thomas Cooper Library attain numerous archives of rarities connected to Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and other American literary lights. Richard Layman, Bruccoli’s partner of 32 years, told TheState.com that Bruccoli was “the most remarkable scholar of the 20th century literature of his generation. Nobody else comes close. He was a teacher above all.” [For a personal remembrance of Bruccoli, see LJ’s In the Bookroom blog]