Gay (Froehlich), Peter Jack

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GAY (Froehlich), PETER JACK

GAY (Froehlich), PETER JACK (Joachim; 1923– ), U.S. historian. Gay, who was born in Berlin, Germany, immigrated to the United States in 1941 and began teaching at Columbia University in 1948. In 1969 he became professor of comparative European intellectual history at Yale. Later he was director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University. Gay's chief interest was the Enlightenment, of which he presented a sympathetic view. His major publications in this field are Voltaire's Politics (1959), Party of Humanity (1964), and The Enlightenment, an Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966). He wrote many other books as well, including The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (1952), A Loss of Mastery (1966), Weimar Culture (1968), Style in History (1976), Art and Act: On Causes in History – Manet, Gropius, Mondrian (1976), Freud, Jews and Other Germans (1978), The Bourgeois Experience (1983), Education of the Senses (1984), The Tender Passion (1986), A Godless Jew (1987), The Cultivation of Hatred (1993), Pleasure Wars (1998), My German Question (1998), Schnitzler's Century (2002), and Savage Reprisals (2002).

[Joseph I. Shulim /

Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)]