The Armada (book)

"The Armada" is a popular history by Garrett Mattingly—a historian who taught at Columbia University—about the attempt of the Spanish Armada to invade England. The book was first published in 1959 by Houghton Mifflin Company and won a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize committee in 1960. [The winner of the Pulitzer prize for history in 1960 was "In the Days of McKinley" by Margaret Leech.]

One biographer wrote that The Armada was "written in purple prose but a royal purple, which read like historical fiction." [James Friguglietti. "Mattingly, Garrett", "American National Biography".] Another biographer noted that Mattingly "treated his job as that of telling a story about people" and that "The Armada" was "that rarity, a book by a professional historian and admired by professional historians which nevertheless became a best seller." [J. H. Hexter, "Doing History" (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 157, 169.] "The Armada" remains in print and has also been issued outside the United States under the title "The Defeat of the Spanish Armada".

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