Carl E. Schorske was born in the Bronx and graduated from Columbia Colege and earned a master's degree from Harvard before serving in the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, during World War II. He returned to Harvard for his Ph.D. He was a Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and has served as Director of European Cultural Studies at Princeton University. He was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his book, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. He died in 2015 at the age of 100.