The Lanier Library’s Brown Bag Lunch program on Tuesday, May 21 will feature Dr. John Mark Dean,

president of the Thomas Cooper Society, a volunteer support organization for the University of South Carolina’s Thomas Cooper Library. His talk is titled “The Thomas Cooper Society and the Rare Books and Special Collections Department at USC at Twenty Three.”

Dean will speak about the library’s Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections comprising more than 150,000 items and over 50 archival collections. Included among them is the Matthew J. & Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald. That collection includes Fitzgerald’s copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, his briefcase and flask, and galleys of Trimalchio, the unpublished text that Fitzgerald rewrote as The Great Gatsby.

Matthew Bruccoli, who donated his collection to the library before he died in 2008, was an English professor at USC from 1969 until 2005. In his lifetime he wrote over 50 books on Fitzgerald, including Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, considered by most to be the definitive biography of the celebrated Jazz Age writer who spent time in the mid-1930s in Tryon.