learning and their sprightly presentation. A friend, Leo Gershoy, recalled that Mattingly lectured with head "cocked, eyes sparkling, his smile benign, he talked in a flow of words, witty, gay, and serious, about poetry and drama and novels, about music he loved dearly, about tapestries and paintings he admired, about rich wines and fine food that few appreciated with equal discrimination. He loved, too, to talk about explorers whose voyages he could so fully trace, and about sailing ships, how they were built and manned and how navigated." Mattingly treated his job as a historian "as that of telling a story about people" and he had "a wide-range panoramic vision." In 1955 Mattingly published Renaissance Diplomacy, a book that made his historical reputation. Exceptionally well researched and citing sources in six languages, Mattingly wrote it in a style both erudite and limpid. As J. H. Hexter later wrote, "If any amount of skill could have made Renaissance Diplomacy a popular book, its author had the skill; but the cards were stacked against him." Nevertheless, Mattingly was so determined not to publish the book with a university press that, at his publisher's recommendation, he cut the manuscript by a third and destroyed the original draft. "It is perhaps a measure of that achievement that the Renaissance Diplomacy which historians read with such admiration is not as good as Mattingly could have made it; it is, indeed, not as good as he had made it. Even so, it remains one of the finest historical works of the past half century." Mattingly's most successful book was The Armada (1959). As one biographer has written, the book was "written in purple prose but a royal purple, which read like historical fiction." Hailed enthusiastically by critics, the book was a bestseller as both Book-of-the-Month Club and History Book Club selections. Mattingly also won a special Pulitzer Prize for the work. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Critical assessment Although a mild "Norman Thomas socialist" in politics, Mattingly had a "low tolerance for ideologies" both political and professional. He once joked that he was an old-fashioned literary historian like "Will Durant, Irving Fisher and William Hickling Prescott." Marriage and later years Mattingly married Gertrude L. McCollum, a teacher, in 1928; the couple had no children. Although his health had been poor for several previous