Peter Gay

He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (The Rise of Modern Paganism); Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988). Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, 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. 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. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".

Born to a Jewish family in Berlin, Gay 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. 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. 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 English calque). Gay attended the University of Denver, where he received his B.A. in 1946, and 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.

Gay was also a champion of psychohistory and an admirer of Sigmund Freud. In 1988, he published a biography of Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time. 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, in A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis, he linked Freud's atheism to his development of psychoanalysis as a field. Gay also wrote history books applying Freud's theories to history, such as the 5-volume The Bourgeois Experience: From Victoria to Freud. He edited a collection of Freud's writings called The Freud Reader. His writing was generally favorable, though occasionally critical, toward Freud's school of thought. In September 1981, Harper's Magazine published a review of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams that Gay falsely claimed to have discovered in "an obscure Austrian medical journal" from July 1900, but had in fact written himself. Gay later claimed that "the whole thing was lighthearted — nothing but a joke". Other historians, 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.

Gay married Ruth Slotkin (1922–2006) in 1959 and had three stepdaughters. Gay died at his home in Manhattan on May 12, 2015, at the age of 91.

The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx, 1952. Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist, 1959. 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. Reissued 1995. The Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America, 1966. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, 1968. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Science of Freedom, 1969. Reissued 1995. The Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues on the Enlightenment, 1970. Modern Europe to 1815, co-written with Robert Kiefer Webb, 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. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, 5 vols., 1984–1998: The Education of the Senses (1984) The Tender Passion (1986) The Cultivation of Hatred (1993) The Naked Heart (1995) Pleasure Wars (1998) 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. Reading Freud: Explorations & Entertainments, 1990. Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities, 1993. My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin, 1998 (autobiography). Mozart, 1999. Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815–1914, 2002. Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks, 2002. Modernism: The Lure of Heresy: from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond, 2007. Why the Romantics Matter, 2015.

Deism: An Anthology, 1968. The Enlightenment; A Comprehensive Anthology, 1973. Historians at Work – 4 vols., 1972–1975. The Freud Reader, 1989.

"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