Peter Gay

Peter Gay was born in Berlin in 1923. He was a professor of History at Yale University and the director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Of German descent (his original surname was Frohlich), he spent his childhood in Nazi Germany, from which his family fled to the United States in 1939. He is an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and is considered an expert on German-Jewish culture. He is the author of numerous books, including the five-volume historical work "The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud." He has written extensive studies on the European Enlightenment: "Age of Enlightenment"; the two-volume "The Enlightenment: An Interpretation," (Vol. 1:) "The Rise of Modern Paganism," and (Vol. 2:) "The Science of Freedom," as well as many essays on the Enlightenment and its representatives. Additionally, he authored "A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis," "Freud: A Life of Our Time," and the autobiographical "My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin." He has been awarded 12 international prizes to date.