Peter Gay
| Peter Gay | |
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Gay in 2007
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| Born | Peter Joachim Fröhlich June 20, 1923 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | May 12, 2015 (aged 91) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Goethe-Gymnasium |
| Notable awards | Heineken Prizes Award for Scholarly Distinction |
Peter Gay (born Peter Joachim Fröhlich; June 20, 1923 – May 12, 2015) was an American historian, educator and author. He was Sterling Professor of History 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 authored over 25 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).
Gay was born in Berlin 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. 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.Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".
Born in June 1923 as Peter Joachim Fröhlich in Berlin, he and his family fled from Nazi Germany in 1939 and arrived in the U.S. 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.
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