At the same time, he accumulated many of the trappings of an upper-middle-class life: four children; a house on Long Island; a devoted wife, followed by another, and then another. Yet he never let domesticity tie him down. A solitary type, at once charismatic and cold, Matthiessen conducted himself like a man beholden to nothing save his work. He said yes to nearly every months-long research trip suggested to him; when home, he sequestered himself in his writing shed. Blessed with rugged good looks that complemented his adventurous life style, he practically had a girl in every port. “I still seem to be pathologically restless in some way and am no fit mate for anybody,” he wrote, after the breakup of his first marriage, to his friend George Plimpton, with whom he’d co-founded The Paris Review. His daughter, Rue Matthiessen, described him similarly: “My father always had a stunning ability to move on, sometimes shucking earlier associations like fresh snow from his shoulders.”