Peter Joachim Gay (né Fröhlich; June 20, 1923 – May 12, 2015) was a German-American historian, educator, and author.

He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003).

He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).

[2] Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years.

[5] Their original ticket was on the MS St. Louis, whose passengers were eventually turned away and forced to return to Europe, but they fortuitously changed their booking to the SS Iberia, which left two weeks earlier.

According to the American Historical Association's Award Citation, Gay's range of "scholarly achievements is truly remarkable".

Although the thesis has many critics, it has been widely accepted by Anglophone scholars and has been reinforced by the large-scale studies done by Robert Darnton, Roy Porter, and Jonathan Israel.

[19][20] Gay claimed, "The whole thing was lighthearted - nothing but a joke", but others, including Frederick Crews, saw it as an "apparent fraud", because Gay did not initially make a public statement after scholars took the review seriously, with Freud historian Peter J. Swales citing it in his scholarly work.

[2] Gay received numerous awards for his scholarship, including the National Book Award in History and Biography for The Rise of Modern Paganism (1967), the first volume of The Enlightenment;[9] the first Amsterdam Prize for Historical Science from The Hague, 1990; and the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1992.