Carl E. Schorske

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Carl E. Schorske (born March 15, 1915 in New York City) is an American cultural historian and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture^[1] (1980), which remains highly significant to modern European intellectual history. He was a recipient of one of the first-ever MacArthur Foundation "genius awards" – winning the top prize with fellow author Robert Penn Warren.

In 1998 Schorske published Thinking With History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton University Press), a collection of essays on Viennese and general history.^[2] In 2004 he was honoured with the Ludwig Wittgenstein-Preis of the Österreichische Forschungsgemeinschaft.^[3] He is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Schorske received his B.A. from Columbia in 1936, and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He served in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, during World War II, as chief of political intelligence for Western Europe. His first book, German Social Democracy, published by Harvard University Press, charts the rise of totalitarian and socialist-revolutionary political forces in Germany in the period following World War I.

Following his war-time service, Schorske taught at Wesleyan University (in the 1950's), the University of California at Berkeley (in the 1960's), and Princeton University (in the 1970's until his retirement in the early 1980's), where he was Dayton-Stockton Professor of History. Professor Schorske was named by Time Magazine as one of the nation's ten top academic leaders.