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.[3]
Born to a Jewish family in Berlin,[5] 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.[6] Their original ticket was on the MSSt. 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.[7] 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 1948–1955 and history from 1955 to 1969. He taught at Yale 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".[8]
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.[9] 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 wider history of the Enlightenment, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966, 1969, 1973), whose first volume won the 1967 U.S. National Book Awardin History and Biography.[10]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. While the thesis has many critics, it has been widely accepted by Anglophone scholars and has been reinforced by the large-scale studies by Robert Darnton, Roy Porter, and most recently by Jonathan Israel.[11] His 1968 book, Weimar Culture, was a study on the cultural history of the Weimar Republic.[12][13]
Gay was also a champion of psychohistory and an admirer of Sigmund 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.[14][15]
Gay's 2007 book Modernism: 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 the pop art of the 1960s.[8]
Gay received numerous awards for his scholarship, including the National Book Awardin History and Biography for The Rise of Modern Paganism (1967), the first volume of The Enlightenment;[10] the first Amsterdam Prize for Historical Science from The Hague, 1990; and the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1992. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1967–68 and 1978–79; 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.[18]
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. Professor Gay held an ACLS Fellowship in 1959–60.[19] He has also been 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.
^ abSiegel, Lee (December 30, 2007). "The Blush of the New". The New York Times. Retrieved May 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.
Sarbin, Theodore S (1987). "Freud for Historians". History and Theory. 26 (3): 352–64. doi:10.2307/2505069. JSTOR2505069.
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.
