Some Champions

Rick Layman met Matt Bruccoli in 1972 when Layman entered USC’s Ph.D. program in English and became the celebrated English professor’s research assistant.

“I had long hair at the time, wore the wide-wale corduroy pants and flowered shirts,” says Layman, who completed his Ph.D. in 1975. “I’m absolutely certain that Bill Nolte, who was head of the English department, assigned me as an RA to Matt as a joke.”

Bruccoli had a reputation for being prickly; almost anyone who knew him has an anecdote about his colorful, sometimes profane disposition. But Layman, who would go on to work alongside him as president and editorial director of Columbia-based publishing house Bruccoli Clark Layman, was privy to another Matthew Bruccoli. In fact, he was privy to several. 

“There were four aspects to Matt that you have to consider,” he says. “First is Matt as a teacher. Second is Matt as a scholar. Third is Matt as a collector. Fourth is Matt as a publisher, which is related to the previous two.”

As a teacher, he was supportive, even nurturing, says Layman — “And as a scholar he was brilliant.” As a collector, building out the world’s foremost collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bruccoli was personable but tenacious and obsessive.

Layman paid close attention. While Bruccoli was chasing down all things Fitzgerald, he himself went all in on Dashiell Hammett. To date, Layman has edited or written nine books on the detective writer, two of which — Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921-1960 and Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade — were nominated for the prestigious Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. In the process, he amassed a sizeable Hammett collection, which he gifted to University Libraries in 2015.

“If you believe in a writer, if you believe in the work, everything about that writer is important,” says Layman. “There’s no scrap of paper that belongs in the trash can. If you’re doing literary research, I was taught by Matt, you leave no stone unturned. If there’s some letter in a library, you go there. You don’t write to the library and say send me a copy. You go there.”

That doggedness also guided Bruccoli’s publishing endeavors, where Layman witnessed his business savvy. In the 1970s, when Gale Research approached Bruccoli and fellow businessman/literary scholar C.E. Frazer Clark Jr. about editing a volume on American authors, Bruccoli secured a deal to produce not just one volume but an ongoing series. 

The Dictionary of Literary Biography, which launched in 1978, comprises more than 395 volumes featuring some 14,000 author biographies. Now a research library fixture, it helped Bruccoli Clark Layman cement its place in the academic publishing world. “You’ve got to know how to negotiate, and that was part of Matt’s genius, too,” says Layman.

Bruccoli contained multitudes, to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, but Layman sums him up in three words: “Action and intelligence.” He was also, for Layman, a mentor. After the junior scholar completed his dissertation on Ring Lardner under Bruccoli’s direction in 1975, the two co-edited a pair of books on the sportswriter and satirist — a Lardner bibliography and the anthology Some Champions. 

Bruccoli died in 2008, but the company he cofounded half a century ago lives on; his portrait now hangs on a wall at the Sumter Street offices. Layman is now president and editorial director of Bruccoli Clark Layman and of Layman Poupard Publishing, which produces Gale Literature Criticism, the largest curated collection of literature criticism in English in the world.

“You know, Matt was my mentor in several respects, not just as a scholar,” says Layman. “I owe him everything. Which is not to say it wasn’t difficult, because very often he was a gruff and grumpy man. But he did things at a rate that left other people in the dust. He was an enlightenment to me. That’s all you can say.”