Scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli was born in the Bronx in 1931. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1953 and with a master's degree and a doctorate from the University of Virginia. He taught English at Ohio State University for eight years before joining the English department at the University of South Carolina in 1969. He retired in 2005 after teaching there for almost 40 years. He wrote over 50 books about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway including Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote biographies of John O'Hara, James Gould Cozzens and Ross Macdonald, compiled descriptive bibliographies on numerous authors and edited the… letters and notebooks of other authors. He died due to glioma, a tumor of the brainstem, on June 4, 2008.