In 1981, in addition to receiving the Pulitzer for general nonfiction, Carl Schorske was among the first class of recipients of a MacArthur fellowship, the so-called genius award.
Carl Schorske, a professor and scholar whose collection of essays fixing turn-of-the-century Vienna as the radiating source of modernist thinking won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 and remains an exemplar of cultural history, has died at the age of 100.
His death on Sept. 13, in a retirement community in East Windsor, N.J., not far from Princeton University where he was a professor for many years, was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Edwards.
A polymath with a gift for communicating complex ideas in a straightforward manner, Prof. Schorske was renowned for his lectures and classroom presence. In 1966, while at the University of California, Berkeley, he was one of 10 "great teachers" pictured on the cover of Time magazine. A 1969 article in the Princeton alumni magazine recalled that after the final lecture of his first course, students stood and applauded.
"He changed my life," Michael Roth, who studied with Prof. Schorske as a freshman at Wesleyan University in 1976 and is now its president, said in an interview. In a written remembrance, he called Prof. Schorske "an extraordinary teacher – erudite, humane and sensitive to the different ways that students learned."
Another former student, John Leonard, who became a book critic for The New York Times, wrote in 1980:
"Twenty years ago, the house I grew up in, metaphorically, was modern European intellectual history as professed by Carl E. Schorske at the university. Through Mr. Schorske's windows, dumbfounded, I looked at Rousseau and Goethe, Marx and Freud. In his drawing room I listened to Bach and managed for the first time to hear Schoenberg. There must have been, out back, a 19th-century garden with the obligatory machine in it, and the Expressionists glowering at the Secessionists and the hardy perennial instincts running wild. It was a wonderful place to live. Ideas rampaged."
Mr. Leonard was writing on the occasion of the publication of Prof. Schorske's collection, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. The book, written over many years, consists of seven essays, each seating different aspects of intellectual life within the context of a significant period of political ferment and social tumult.
In separate chapters, he considered narrative literature, architecture, music, psychology, painting, philosophy and other disciplines, focusing on Viennese intellectual figures, among them Sigmund Freud, playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler, painter Gustav Klimt, composer Arnold Schoenberg and artist and writer Oskar Kokoschka.
The chapters coalesced into a cogent argument positing Vienna from the late 19th century until the end of the First World War as a crucible of change in Western intellectual life – the time and place where the past abruptly receded from contemporary art and thought, and modernism gained a foothold and momentum.
"Vienna, in the fin de siècle, with its acutely felt tremors of social and political disintegration, proved one of the most fertile breeding grounds of our century's ahistorical culture," Prof. Schorske wrote. "Its great intellectual innovators – in music and philosophy, in economics and architecture, and, of course, in psychoanalysis – all broke, more or less deliberately, their ties to the historical outlook central to the 19th-century liberal culture in which they'd been reared."
In 1981, in addition to receiving the Pulitzer for general nonfiction, Prof. Schorske was among the first class of recipients of a MacArthur fellowship, the so-called genius award.
His book was admired not simply for its potent creative thinking – "a model for interdisciplinary writing, although no one will soon match Schorske's inquisitive erudition," the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross wrote last week – but also for its author's elegance as a writer.
"Many of us academics write like klutzes," said Dr. Roth, the president of Wesleyan. "What Schorske did in each essay was write in a way that lived up to the intellectual and aesthetic standards of the culture makers he had studied."
Carl Emil Schorske was born in the Bronx, N.Y., on March 15, 1915, to Theodore Schorske, a banker, and the former Gertrude Goldsmith. He grew up and went to high school in Scarsdale, N.Y. He graduated from Columbia and earned a master's degree from Harvard before serving in the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, during the Second World War. He returned to Harvard for his doctorate.
Prof. Schorske, who played the violin and was fond of singing German lieder, often said that his love of music figured into his thinking and his teaching. His other books include German Social Democracy, 1905-1917 (1955) and Thinking With History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (1998), a collection of essays on the evolution of the role of history in 19th- and 20th-century thought.
Prof. Schorske's wife, the former Elizabeth Rorke, died last year after more than 70 years of marriage. A son, Stephen, died in 2013. In addition to his daughter, he leaves three sons, Carl Theodore, John and Richard, and extended family.