Peter Gay

**Peter Gay** (born **Peter Joachim Fröhlich**; June 20, 1923 – May 12, 2015) was the Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). Gay received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, including *The Enlightenment: An Interpretation*, a multi-volume award winner; *Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider* (1968), a bestseller; and the widely translated *Freud: A Life for Our Time* (1988).

Peter Gay was born in Berlin, Germany in 1923 and immigrated to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University’s History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History, and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".

## Life

Born in 1923 as **Peter Joachim Fröhlich** in Berlin, Gay and his family fled from Nazi Germany in 1939 and arrived in America in 1941. In Berlin he was educated at the Goethe-Gymnasium. His family initially booked passage on the MS *St. Louis* (whose passengers were eventually denied visas) but fortuitously changed their booking to an earlier voyage to Cuba. He came to the United States in 1941, took American citizenship in 1946, and changed his name from Fröhlich (German for "happy") to Gay. Gay received his education at the University of Denver, where he was awarded a BA in 1946 and at Columbia University where he was awarded an MA in 1947 and PhD in 1951. Gay worked as political science professor at Columbia between 1948–1955 and as history professor from 1955-1969. He taught at Yale from 1969 until his retirement in 1993. He was married to Ruth Slotkin (died 2006) in 1959 and has three stepchildren. Peter Gay died at home in Manhattan, New York on May 12, 2015 at the age of 91.

## Scholarship

According to the American Historical Association's Award Citation, Gay's range of "scholarly achievements is truly remarkable". *The New York Times* described him in 2007 as "the country's pre-eminent cultural historian".

Gay's 1959 book, *Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist* examined Voltaire as a politician and how his politics influenced the ideas that Voltaire championed in his writings. Gay followed the success of *Voltaire's Politics* with a wider history of the Enlightenment, *The Enlightenment: An Interpretation* (1966, 1969, 1973), whose first volume won the 1967 U.S. National Book Award in History and Biography. His 1968 book, *Weimar Culture*, was a study on the cultural history of the Weimar Republic.

Gay was also a champion of psychohistory and an admirer of Sigmund Freud. Starting in 1978 with *Freud, Jews and Other Germans*, an examination of the impact of Freudian ideas on German culture, his writing demonstrated an increasing interest in psychology. Many of his works focused on the social impact of psychoanalysis. For example, he wrote *A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis*, where he wrote about Freud's atheism and linked it to his development of psychoanalysis as a field. He wrote history books applying Freud's theories to history, such as *The Bourgeois Experience: From Victoria to Freud*. He also edited a collection of Freud's writings called *The Freud Reader*. His writing was generally favorable to Freud and his school of thought, although it could be critical at times.

Gay's 2007 book *Modernism: The Lure of Heresy* explored the modernist movement in the arts from the 1840s to the 1960s, from its beginnings in Paris to its spread to Berlin and New York City, ending with its death in the 1960s with Pop Art.

## Awards

Peter Gay has received numerous awards for his scholarship, including the National Book Award in History and Biography for *The Rise of Modern Paganism* (1967), the first volume of *The Enlightenment*; the first Amsterdam Prize for Historical Science from The Hague, 1990; and the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1992. In addition, he was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1967–68 and in 1978–79, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, Germany, and an Overseas Fellow of Churchill College University from 1970 to 1971. In 1988, he was honored by The New York Public Library as a Library Lion. The following year, he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Professor Gay held an ACLS Fellowship in 1959–60. He has also been recognized with several honorary doctorates.

* American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction, 2004
* *Geschwister-Scholl-Preis* (Munich, 1999)
* American Academy of Arts and Letters, Gold Medal, 1992
* Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Award for Historical Science, The A.H. Heineken Prize, 1990
* American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1989
* New York Public Library, Library Lion, 1988
* National Book Award, 1967
* Guggenheim Fellowship 1966

## Works

* *The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx*, 1952.
* *Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist*, 1959.
* "Rhetoric and Politics in the French Revolution," *The American Historical Review* Vol. 66, No. 3, April 1961
* "An Age of Crisis: A Critical View," *The Journal of Modern History* Vol. 33, No. 2, June 1961
* *The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment*, 1964.
* *The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism*, 1966 — winner of the National Book Award.
* *The Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America*, 1966.
* *Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider*, 1968.
* *Deism: An Anthology*, 1968.
* *The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Science of Freedom*, 1969.
* *The Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues on the Enlightenment*, 1970.
* *Historians at Work* - 4 vols., 1972-5.
* co-written with Robert Kiefer Webb, *Modern Europe: Since 1815*, 1973.
* *The Enlightenment; A Comprehensive Anthology*, 1973.
* *Style in History*, 1974.
* *Art and Act: On Causes in History— Manet, Gropius, Mondrian*, 1976.
* *Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture*, 1978.
* *Education of the Senses*, 1984.
* *The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud* - 5 vols, 1984-1998 (includes *The Education of the Senses*. *The Cultivation of Hatred*, *The Tender Passion* *The Naked Heart*, and *Pleasure Wars*).
* *Freud for Historians*, 1985.
* *A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis*, 1987.
* *Freud: A Life for Our Time*, 1988 — finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
* Editor *The Freud Reader*, 1989.
* *Reading Freud: Explorations & Entertainments*, 1990.
* *Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities*, 1993.
* *The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud*, 5 vols., 1993-9.
* *The Enlightenment and the Rise of Modern Paganism* revised edition, 1995.
* *My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin*, 1998 (autobiography). Chapter 1: Return of the Native. ISBN 0-300-07670-3
* *Mozart*, 1999.
* *Schnitzler's Century*, 2002.
* *Modernism: The Lure of Heresy: from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond*, 2007.

## References

1. ↑ W.W. Norton Publishers
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Grimes, William, Peter Gay, Historian Who Explored Social History of Ideas, Dies at 91. *The New York Times*, May 12, 2015.
3. ↑ "Q&A with Peter Gay", Boston Globe, By Kate Bolick, November 25, 2007
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 **Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration' not found.**
5. ↑ Rodrigo Brandão, "Can a Skeptic be a Reformer? Skepticism in Morals and Politics During the Enlightenment: The Case of Voltaire," *Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries* (2015)
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 "National Book Awards – 1967". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-18.
7. ↑ "Weimar Culture : the Outsider as Insider Peter Gay". The Spectator. Retrieved 2015-05-11.
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14. ↑ " ACLS.org
15. ↑ [http://www.denverpost.com/ci\_28099912/peter-gay-intellectual-historian-dead-at-age-91 "Peter Gay, intellectual historian, dead at age 91". The Associated Press. Retrieved 2015-05-11.
16. ↑ "dankesrede von peter gay". Geschwister-Scholl-Preis. Retrieved 2015-05-11.
17. ↑ "Peter Gay, Intellectual Historian, Dead at Age 91". ABC News. Retrieved 2015-05-11.
18. ↑ "Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Awards 2008 History Prize to Jonathan Israel". Institute for Advanced Studies. Retrieved 2015-05-11.
19. ↑ "Arts : Arts and Letters Group Admits 10". LA Times. Retrieved 2015-05-11.
20. ↑ "Bookworms Devour Library's Lions". New York Times. Retrieved 2015-05-22.
21. ↑ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Peter Gay". Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved 2015-05-11.
22. ↑ amazon.com
23. ↑ amazon.com
24. ↑ [ https://books.google.com/books/about/The\_Party\_of\_Humanity.html?id=QhtDAAAAIAAJ&hl=en books.google.com]
25. ↑ books.google.com
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29. ↑ amazon.com
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## Further reading

* Toews, John: "Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in His Time and of Our Time." *Journal of Modern History*, Volume 63 (1991), pp. 504–545.

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