Peter Gay Explained

Peter Gay
Birth Name:Peter Joachim Fröhlich
Birth Date:20 June 1923
Birth Place:Berlin, Germany
Death Place:New York, New York, U.S.
Nationality:American
Awards:Heineken Prizes
Award for Scholarly Distinction
Education:University of Denver (BA)
Columbia University (MA, PhD)

Peter Joachim Gay (né Fröhlich; June 20, 1923 – May 12, 2015) was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including , a two-volume award winner; (1968), a bestseller; and the widely translated (1988).[1]

Gay was born in Berlin in 1923 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941.[2] 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.

Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years.[3] Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".

Early life and education

Born to a Jewish family in Berlin,[4] he was educated as a child at Berlin's Goethe-Gymnasium. He and his family fled Nazi Germany in 1939, when he was 15 years old.[5] Their original ticket was on the MS St. Louis, whose passengers were eventually turned away and forced to return to Europe, but they fortuitously changed their booking to the SS Iberia, which left two weeks earlier.[6] Gay arrived in the United States in 1941, took American citizenship in 1946, and changed his name from Fröhlich (German for "happy") to Gay (an English calque).

Gay was educated at the University of Denver, where he received his B.A. in 1946, and at Columbia University, where he received his M.A. in 1947 and his Ph.D. in 1951. Gay taught political science at Columbia between 1948 and 1955 and history from 1955 to 1969. He taught at Yale University from 1969 until his retirement in 1993.

Career

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".[7]

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.[8] Accompanying Voltaire's Politics was Gay's collection of essays, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (1964). Gay followed the success of Voltaire's Politics with a two-volume 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. Annelien de Dijn argues that Gay, in The Enlightenment, first formulated the interpretation that the Enlightenment brought political modernization to the West, in terms of introducing democratic values and institutions and the creation of modern, liberal democracies. Although the thesis has many critics, it has been widely accepted by Anglophone scholars and has been reinforced by the large-scale studies done by Robert Darnton, Roy Porter, and Jonathan Israel.[9] Gay's 1968 book, Weimar Culture, examined the artistic, literary, and musical cultural history of the Weimar Republic.[10] [11]

Gay was also a champion of psychohistory and an admirer of Sigmund Freud.[12] [13] In 1988, he published a biography of Freud, .[14] [15] 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.[16] Many of his works focused on the social impact of psychoanalysis. For example, in A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis, he linked Freud's atheism to his development of psychoanalysis as a field.[17] 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.[16] His writing was generally favorable, though occasionally critical, toward Freud's school of thought.[12] [13]

In the September 1981 issue of Harper's Magazine, Gay published a review he wrote of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, falsely claiming to have discovered the review in "an obscure Austrian medical journal" from July 1900.[18] [19] Gay claimed, "The whole thing was lighthearted - nothing but a joke", but others, including Frederick Crews, saw it as an "apparent fraud", because Gay did not initially make a public statement after scholars took the review seriously, with Freud historian Peter J. Swales citing it in his scholarly work.[20] [21]

Gay's 2007 book explores 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 pop art of the 1960s.[7]

Personal life

Gay married Ruth Slotkin (1922–2006) in 1959 and had three stepdaughters.

Death

Gay died at his home in Manhattan on May 12, 2015, at the age of 91.[22]

Awards and recognition

Gay 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.

Professor Gay held an ACLS Fellowship in 1959–1960.[23] He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1967–1968 and 1978–1979; a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, Germany; and an Overseas Fellow of Churchill College University from 1970 to 1971. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1987.[24]

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. He has also been recognized with several honorary doctorates.

Bibliography

Author

Editor

Essays

Further reading

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Peter Gay. 14 May 2015.
  2. [Andreas Daum|Andreas W. Daum]
  3. [Robert Wilson (editor)|Robert Wilson]
  4. News: Peter Gay, Historian Who Explored Social History of Ideas, Dies at 91. Grimes. William. 2015-05-12. The New York Times. 2019-11-20. en-US. 0362-4331.
  5. Bolick, Kate. "Q&A with Peter Gay", The Boston Globe, 25 November 2007.
  6. Book: Gay, Peter . My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin . 1998 . Yale University Press . 0-585-34757-3 . New Haven . 150 . 47011660.
  7. Web site: The Blush of the New. The New York Times. Siegel, Lee. December 30, 2007. May 13, 2015.
  8. 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)
  9. De Dijn . Annelien . 2012 . The Politics of Enlightenment: From Peter Gay to Jonathan Israel . Historical Journal . 55 . 3. 785–805 . 10.1017/S0018246X12000301 . 145439970 .
  10. http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/23rd-may-1969/18/weimar-culture-the-outsider-as-insider-peter-gay-s "Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider"
  11. Web site: Berlin, Brecht, Bauhaus and a Whole Generation of Isherwoods . The New York Times . November 24, 1968 . May 13, 2015. (review by Walter Laqueur of Weimar Culture)
  12. Web site: The World on a Couch. The New York Times. Rogow, Arnold A.. September 8, 1985. May 13, 2015.
  13. Web site: Remembering Historian and Freud Biographer Peter Gay. Forward. Ivry, Benjamin. May 13, 2015. May 13, 2015.
  14. Gay, Peter, , New York: W. W. Norton, 1988)
  15. [Peter Swales (historian)|Swales, Peter J.]
  16. Web site: A Love Affair With German Culture . The New York Times . January 29, 1978 . May 13, 2015 . Green, Martin.
  17. Web site: Mapping the States of the Mind . The New York Times . October 11, 1987 . May 13, 2015 . Marshall, John.
  18. Reprinted in Book: Reading Freud: Explorations & Entertainments. 0300046812. Gay. Peter. 1990. Yale University Press .
  19. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/15/books/l-reading-freud-300490.html 'Reading Freud'
  20. [Daniel Goleman|Goleman, Daniel]
  21. Rudnytsky, Peter L., "Peter J. Swales: Sovereign unto Myself," p. 328, n.44 (2000).
  22. Grimes, William, Peter Gay, Historian Who Explored Social History of Ideas, Dies at 91. 'The New York Times, May 12, 2015.
  23. http://www.acls.org/programs/Default.aspx?id=1166" ACLS.org
  24. Web site: APS Member History . 2022-05-09 . search.amphilsoc.org.
  25. http://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/peter-gay/ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Peter Gay"
  26. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/11/nyregion/bookworms-devour-library-s-lions.html "Bookworms Devour Library's Lions"
  27. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-03-01-mn-736-story.html "Arts : Arts and Letters Group Admits 10"
  28. https://www.ias.edu/news/press-releases/2009-16 "Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Awards 2008 History Prize to Jonathan Israel"
  29. https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/peter-gay-intellectual-historian-dead-age-91-30988308 "Peter Gay, Intellectual Historian, Dead at Age 91"
  30. http://www.geschwister-scholl-preis.de/preistraeger_1990-1999/1999/gay.php "dankesrede von peter gay"
  31. Web site: Peter Gay, intellectual historian, dead at age 91. The Denver Post. May 11, 2015. May 11, 2015.
  32. Book: The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism. Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx.: Peter Gay: Amazon.com: Books. Collier. 14 May 2015.
  33. Book: Amazon.com: Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist (9780300040951): Professor Peter Gay: Books. 0300040954 . Gay . Peter . 1988 . Yale University Press .
  34. Book: The Party of Humanity. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1964. Knopf . 9789010044341.
  35. https://www.nationalbook.org/awards-prizes/national-book-awards-1967 "National Book Awards – 1967"
  36. Book: A Loss of Mastery. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1966. University of California Press . 9780608179919.
  37. Book: Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. 9780393322392. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 17 December 2001. W. W. Norton & Company .
  38. Web site: The Bridge of Criticism. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1970.
  39. Book: Modern Europe: Since 1815. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. Webb. Robert Kiefer. 1973. Harper & Row . 9780060422837.
  40. Book: Style in History. 9780393305586. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1988. W. W. Norton & Company .
  41. Book: Art and Act. 9780064332484. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1976. Harper & Row .
  42. Book: Freud, Jews and Other Germans. 9780195024937. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1979. Oxford University Press .
  43. Book: The Bourgeois Experience. 9780393045703. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1984. Oxford University Press .
  44. Book: Freud for Historians. 9780195042283. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1985. Oxford University Press .
  45. Book: A Godless Jew. 0300046081. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1987. Yale University Press .
  46. Web site: 1988 National Book Awards Winners and Finalists . National Book Foundation . May 13, 2015.
  47. Book: Reading Freud. 0300046812. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1990. Yale University Press .
  48. Book: Sigmund Freud and Art. 9780810925519. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. September 1993. Abrams .
  49. Book: My German Question. 9780300076707. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1998. Yale University Press .
  50. Book: Mozart. 9780670882380. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1999. Penguin .
  51. Book: Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815–1914. 9780393323634. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 17 November 2002. W. W. Norton & Company .
  52. News: Reynolds . David S. . 2002-08-04 . Don't Get Mad, Write Novels . en-US . The New York Times . 2023-11-22 . 0362-4331.
  53. Book: Modernism. 9780393052053. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 2008. W. W. Norton & Company .
  54. Book: Deism: An Anthology. 14 May 2015. Gay. Peter. 1968. 9780442000936.
  55. Book: The Enlightenment: A Comprehensive Anthology. 1973. 9780671214654. 14 May 2015. Gay . Peter .
  56. Book: Historians at Work (4 Volumes Set): Peter Gay, Gerald J. Cavanaugh: 9780060114732: Amazon.com: Books. 0060114738. Gay. Peter. Cavanaugh. Gerald J.. Wexler. Victor G.. 1972.
  57. Book: The Freud Reader. 9780393314038. 14 May 2015. Freud. Sigmund. 1995.

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