The Matthew J. & Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald constitutes the most comprehensive research collection for the study and teaching of Fitzgerald, those associated with him, and his times. Initiated by Dr. Matthew J. Bruccoli as a student in the 1950s, the collection was built in subsequent decades with the encouragement of his wife, Arlyn, and of Fitzgerald's daughter, Scottie. In 1994, the Bruccolis committed their collection (then conservatively valued at $1.2 million) to USC's Thomas Cooper Library under a multi-year gift-purchase agreement. Over the past 10 years, the Bruccolis have donated additional material to this and other special collections at Thomas Cooper Library with an appraised value in excess of $1.9 million.

A.  Major components of the collection at the time of the original transfer

• Books: more than 3,000 books and periodical publications by and about F. Scott Fitzgerald, including every printing of every Fitzgerald book in the English language.
   
• Manuscripts and proofs: the only unrevised galley proofs for Fitzgerald's Trimalchio (subsequently rewritten as The Great Gatsby), the galley proofs for the first serial installment of Tender Is the Night and revised typescripts of "The Swimmers," "The Count of Darkness," and "The Kingdom in the Dark," together with Fitzgerald's pocket notebook for The Love of the Last Tycoon.

 
• Letters: more than 100 letters, including letters to his early mentor Shane Leslie; his editor, Maxwell Perkins; his agent, Harold Ober; his wife, Zelda; and his daughter, Scottie.
   
• Inscriptions: more than 40 books inscribed by Fitzgerald as well as books inscribed to him by such authors as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway.
   
• Scripts and adaptations: copies of Fitzgerald's own screenplays, together with other writers' adaptations of his work for stage, screen, radio and television.
   
• Juvenilia and Princetoniana: runs of the school and Princeton magazines for which he wrote, acting scripts for the three Triangle Club shows he wrote at Princeton and Princeton yearbooks.
   
• Photos and memorabilia, including the only photo of Hemingway inscribed to Fitzgerald, the engraved silver flask that Zelda and her friends gave him in October 1918 when he was scheduled to embark for France, and his briefcase.
   
• Writings by Zelda Fitzgerald, including manuscript material and publications by and about her.
   
• Materials on Fitzgerald's friends and associates: satellite collections for Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Edmund Wilson, Budd Schulberg, Sheilah Graham, Donald Ogden Stewart, the House of Scribner, and other Scribners authors.

B.  The Bruccoli Collection now

Since the original transfer, Dr. and Mrs. Bruccoli, and the University library have been committed to continued building of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Collection, both through gifts from the Bruccolis and through selected purchase.  Among the items added since 1994 are:

• Fitzgerald screenplays, 2000 pages of manuscripts and revised typescripts for Fitzgerald's MGM screenplays, 1937 - 38.
   
• Additional Fitzgerald letters, including a previously unknown letter of April 1924 describing his "third novel, just completed" (The Great Gatsby), and a 1925 letter from Paris by Ernest Hemingway that claims he is giving Fitzgerald boxing lessons.
   
• Three paintings by Zelda Fitzgerald, donated by Arlyn Bruccoli.
   
• Inscribed books, including the only known book inscribed both by Scott and Zelda (to her psychiatrist), a copy of Tender Is the Night inscribed to "Miss Television," and a copy of Goodbye to All That signed by Fitzgerald as "Robert Graves."
   
• Books from Fitzgerald's library, including his copy of Kipling's poems with annotations (purchased by an anonymous donor).
   
• Memorabilia, including Fitzgerald's Newman School medals and the set of stereoscopic slides of World War I battlefields that he purchased in Paris in the 1920s .
   
• File copies of Fitzgerald's books from the Harold Ober Agency (gift of an anonymous donor).
   
• Fitzgerald's contracts with his publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, from his first novel, This Side of Paradise onwards.
   
• Fitzgerald's tax returns, the record of Fitzgerald's work as a professional author as documented in his tax returns (federal and state), from 1920 - 40.

• Scottie Fitzgerald material: extensive holdings related to her work with Professor Bruccoli on Fitzgerald projects.