Gay was born inBerlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, viaCuba, to the United States in 1941.[1] From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor atColumbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to joinYale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.[2]
Born to aJewish family in Berlin,[4] Gay was educated as a child at Berlin's Goethe-Gymnasium. He and his family fledNazi Germany in 1939, when he was 15 years old.[5] Their original ticket was on theMSSt. Louis, whose passengers were eventually turned away and forced to return to Europe, but they fortuitously changed their booking to the SSIberia, 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 "merry" or "cheerful") to Gay (an Englishcalque).
Gay attended theUniversity of Denver, where he received his B.A. in 1946, andColumbia 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 atYale University from 1969 until his retirement in 1993.
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, examinedVoltaire as a politician and how his politics influenced the ideas that Voltaire championed in his writings.[8] AccompanyingVoltaire's Politics was Gay's collection of essays,The Party of Humanity: Essays in theFrench Enlightenment (1964).
Gay followed the success ofVoltaire's Politics with a two-volume history of theEnlightenment,The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966, 1969, 1973), whose first volume won the 1967 U.S.National Book Awardin History and Biography.[9]Annelien de Dijn argues that Gay, inThe 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 byRobert Darnton (Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment),Roy Porter (The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold story of the British Enlightenment), andJonathan Israel (Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750).[10]
Gay was also a champion ofpsychohistory and an admirer ofSigmund Freud.[13][14] In 1988, he published a biography of Freud,Freud: A Life for Our Time.[15][16][17] Starting in 1978 withFreud, Jews and Other Germans, an examination of the impact of Freudian ideas on German culture, his writing demonstrated an increasing interest in psychology.[18] Many of his works focused on the social impact ofpsychoanalysis. For example, inA Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis, he linked Freud's atheism to his development of psychoanalysis as a field.[19] He wrote history books applying Freud's theories to history, such as the 5-volumeThe Bourgeois Experience: From Victoria to Freud. He also edited a collection of Freud's writings calledThe Freud Reader.[18] His writing was generally favorable, though occasionally critical, toward Freud's school of thought.[13][14]
In September 1981,Harper's Magazine published Gay's review of Freud'sThe Interpretation of Dreams, which he falsely claimed to have discovered in "an obscure Austrian medical journal" from July 1900.[20][21][22] Gay claimed that "the whole thing was lighthearted — nothing but a joke", but others, includingFrederick Crews, saw it as an "apparent fraud", because Gay did not initially make a public statement after scholars took the review seriously, with Freud historianPeter J. Swales citing it in his scholarly work.[23][24]
Gay's 2007 bookModernism: The Lure of Heresy 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 thepop art movement of the 1960s.[7]
Gay received numerous awards for his scholarship, including theNational Book Awardin History and Biography forThe Rise of Modern Paganism (1967), the first volume ofThe Enlightenment;[9] the first Amsterdam Prize for Historical Science from The Hague, 1990; and the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1992.
Gay held anACLS Fellowship in 1959–1960.[26] 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 theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1987.[27]
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 was recognized with several honorary doctorates.[citation needed]
^Andreas W. Daum, ‘’Refugees from Nazi Germany as Historians: Origins and Migrations, Interests and Identities,” in Daum, ed.,The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians. With a Biobibliographic Guide. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016, 1–52.
^Gay, Peter (1998).My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 150.ISBN0-585-34757-3.OCLC47011660.
^abSiegel, Lee (December 30, 2007)."The Blush of the New".The New York Times. RetrievedMay 13, 2015.
^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).
^De Dijn, Annelien (2012). "The Politics of Enlightenment: From Peter Gay to Jonathan Israel".Historical Journal.55 (3):785–805.doi:10.1017/S0018246X12000301.S2CID145439970.
^Gay, Peter (1988).Amazon.com: Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist (9780300040951): Professor Peter Gay: Books. Yale University Press.ISBN0300040954.
^Gay, Peter; Cavanaugh, Gerald J.; Wexler, Victor G. (1972).Historians at Work (4 Volumes Set): Peter Gay, Gerald J. Cavanaugh: 9780060114732: Amazon.com: Books.ISBN0060114738.
Toews, John (1991). "Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in His Time and of Our Time".Journal of Modern History.63 (3):504–545.doi:10.1086/244354.JSTOR2938629.S2CID143193127.
