Loading
PM![]()
author
Prof. Garrett Mattingly
Garrett Mattingly (May 6, 1900 - December 18, 1962) was a professor of European history at Columbia University who specialized in early modern diplomatic history.
Born in Washington, D.C., his fam...view moreGarrett Mattingly (May 6, 1900 - December 18, 1962) was a professor of European history at Columbia University who specialized in early modern diplomatic history.
Born in Washington, D.C., his family moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1913. After graduation, he served as a sergeant in the U. S. Army from 1918-1919. He earned an A. B. summa cum laude at Harvard University (1923). He received his M.A. in history at Harvard (1926) and began his academic career at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, teaching history and literature.
He completed his PhD at Harvard in 1935, having developed a strong interest in the sixteenth century and coming under the influence of Roger B. Merriman, a specialist in the history of the Spanish Empire. Aided by a Guggenheim Fellowship, of which Mattingly was a four-time winner, he spent the academic year 1937-1938 undertaking intensive research in European archives, teaching himself several foreign languages and sixteenth-century script in order to understand them.
His first book, the biography Catherine of Aragon (1941), was chosen as a selection of the Literary Guild. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Naval Reserve as a lieutenant-commander, but spent most of his service in Washington, D.C., instructing intelligence officers. In the process he learned much about naval operations which would later prove useful writing his most successful book, the bestseller The Armada (1959), winning him the 1960 Pulitzer Prize.
In 1947 Prof. Mattingly joined the department of history at Columbia University where he spent the remainder of his career and was appointed William R. Shepherd Professor of European History in 1959.
He was married to Gertrude L. McCollum, a teacher. He died unexpectedly of emphysema while serving as George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford University in 1962, aged 62.view less