Carl Emil Schorske

Carl Emil Schorske (born March 15, 1915) 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 (1980), which remains highly significant to modern European intellectual history. He was a recipient of the first year of MacArthur Fellows Program awards in 1981.

Biography

Born in New York City, 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 in 1955, describes the schism of the German Social Democratic Party into a reformist/constitutionalist Right faction and a revolutionary oppositionist Left faction during the years 1905-1917.

Following his war-time service, Schorske taught at Wesleyan University (in the 1950s), the University of California at Berkeley (in the 1960s), and Princeton University (in the 1970s until his retirement in the early 1980s), 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. In 1987, he held the Charles Homer Haskins Price Lecture.

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. In 2004 he was honoured with the Ludwig Wittgenstein-Preis of the Österreichische Forschungsgemeinschaft. He is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.