Historian Peter Gay has died. He was 91 years old.
Throughout his career, Gay researched and wrote about a wide array of different subjects including the Enlightenment, Victorian middle class societies, and psychologist Sigmund Freud. He continued working into his 80’s and published Modernism: The Lure of Heresy in 2007.
Here’s more from The New York Times: “It was his work on the 18th century that sealed Mr. Gay’s reputation as one of the pre-eminent historians of his generation. Voltaire’s Politics, published in 1959, was followed by The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a monumental two-part study whose first volume, subtitled The Rise of Modern Paganism, won the National Book Award in 1967. The second volume, subtitled The Science of Freedom, was published in 1969.” (via The Seattle Times)