1 | Name: | Dr. Peter Gay | |
Institution: | Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library & Yale University | ||
Year Elected: | 1987 | ||
Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | ||
Residency: | Resident | ||
Living? : | Deceased | ||
Birth Date: | 1923 | ||
Death Date: | May 12, 2015 | ||
Peter Gay was born Peter Joachim Fröhlich in Berlin in 1923. After witnessing Kristallnacht, he fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and arrived in the United States in 1941. After earning his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, Dr. Gay became a political science professor and history professor at Columbia. In 1969 he moved to Yale University, where he taught until his retirement in 1993 and became Sterling Professor Emeritus of History. Dr. Gay's richness and range of historical interests are suggested in his many publications, from Voltaire's Politics (1959) to Weimar Culture (1968) to the five-volume The Bourgeois Experience (1984-98). A leading champion of psychoanalytic history, Dr. Gay also examined the impact of Freudian ideas on German culture in Freud, Jews and Other Germans (1978). His last work was Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (2007). A leading historian of the social history of ideas, Dr. Gay was a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and received the National Book Award, Melchor Book Award, and Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, among other honors. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1987. Peter Gay died May 12, 2015, at the age of 91 at his home in Manhattan. |