Carl E. Schorske, at 100, historian won Pulitzer

NEW YORK — Carl E. Schorske, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and popular classroom lecturer whose “Fin-De-Siecle Vienna” is widely regarded as a classic work of intellectual scholarship, has died.

Mr. Schorske, who was 100, died Sept. 13 at Meadow Lakes senior facility in East Windsor, N.J., according to Martin Mbugua, a spokesman for Princeton University, where the historian was a professor emeritus.

“Fin-de-Siecle Vienna,” published in 1980, is a broad and detailed survey of Austrian politics and culture at the end of the 19th century, a setting that profoundly influenced the 20th century.

Mr. Schorske emphasized that all were responding to a breakdown in the liberal consensus of previous decades and unleashing desires to recapture the past, make sense of the present and race into the future. The era was a time of provocative sensuality, dreamy escapism and rising demagoguery, with Austrian George Ritter von Schonerer perfecting a fiery right-wing populism that would deeply impress young Austrian, Adolf Hitler.

The book, released when he was in his mid-60s and near retirement from Princeton, was the culmination of his academic career. New York Times critic John Leonard, who studied under Mr. Schorske in the 1950s at the University of California at Berkeley, found that “Fin-De-Siecle” confirmed what he had hoped for and suspected, that Mr. Schorske was “smarter and better than the rest of us.”

“Culture is his air and water; he respires ideas, and whistles and hums as he does so,” Leonard wrote. “His book is a wonderful place to live.”

In 1981, the same year he won the Pulitzer, Mr. Schorske was part of the first group of “Genius Grant” recipients from the MacArthur Foundation.