17 Facts About Peter Gay

Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author.

Peter Gay was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers.

Peter Gay received the American Historical Association's Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004.

Peter Gay 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.

Peter 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.

Peter Gay arrived in the United States in 1941, took American citizenship in 1946, and changed his name from Frohlich to Peter Gay.

Peter Gay taught political science at Columbia between 1948 and 1955 and history from 1955 to 1969.

Peter Gay taught at Yale University from 1969 until his retirement in 1993.

Peter Gay followed the success of Voltaire's Politics with a two-volume history of the Enlightenment, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, whose first volume won the 1967 US National Book Award in History and Biography.

Peter Gay was a champion of psychohistory and an admirer of Sigmund Freud.

Peter Gay wrote history books applying Freud's theories to history, such as The Bourgeois Experience: From Victoria to Freud.

Peter Gay edited a collection of Freud's writings called The Freud Reader.

Peter Gay's writing was generally favorable, though occasionally critical, toward Freud's school of thought.

Peter Gay married Ruth Slotkin in 1959 and had three stepdaughters.

Peter Gay died at his home in Manhattan on May 12,2015, at the age of 91.

Peter Gay received numerous awards for his scholarship, including the National Book Award in History and Biography for The Rise of Modern Paganism, the first volume of The Enlightenment; the first Amsterdam Prize for Historical Science from The Hague, 1990; and the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1992.

Peter Gay was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1987.