Peter Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, specialized in the field of social history and historian of ideas. In 1941 he came to the United States, fleeing the Nazis, and five years later became an American citizen. He first studied philosophy and history then. Currently he is professor of the latter subject at the University of Yale.
As a graduate of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and distinguished historian of culture has become a unique authority in his field. He has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim and Churchill College, Cambridge, and numerous other awards.
Gay's first interest was intellectual history and his first successful book Voltaire's Politics (1959) which examines how the political ideas of Voltaire were the central column of the writings of French thought. With this book, Gay began a broad cultural history of the Enlightenment The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966), a book with which the German historian received the National Book Prize and the Book Prize Mecher. His book cutlures Weimar (1968) has been considered as a milestone for cultural history.
On the other hand, Gay has also been interested in psychology, Freud, Jews and Other Germans (1978) analyzes the impact of Freudian ideas in German culture.