Carl Schorske | Noted scholar, 100

Carl E. Schorske, 100, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and popular classroom lecturer whose

Fin-De-Siecle Vienna

is widely regarded as a classic work of intellectual scholarship, died Sept. 13 in East Windsor, N.J.

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.

Dr. 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 a young Austrian, Adolf Hitler.

The book, released when he was in his mid-60s and near retirement from Princeton University, was the culmination of his academic career. New York Times critic John Leonard, who studied under Dr. 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 Dr. 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 year he won the Pulitzer, Dr. Schorske was part of the first group of "Genius Grant" recipients from the MacArthur Foundation.

Born in New York in 1915, Carl Emil Schorske was the son of a German banker and remembered growing up in a family immersed in politics and art. He studied at Columbia University as an undergraduate and received a master's and doctorate from Harvard University. In 1942, he married Elizabeth Rorke, with whom he had five children. Elizabeth Rorke Schorske, a human-rights and antiwar activist, died in 2014. - AP