Au audacious work, Schnitzler's Century reassesses 19th-century history and traces the dramatic rise of the middle class. We have always believed that corseted Queen Victoria defined the mores of the 19th century. Yet Peter Gay suggests in this provocative, seminal work that it is the sexually emboldened Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler, who provides a better symbol for the age. Challenging many of the sacrosanct theories of Darwin and Freud, Gay chronicles the rise of modernity in countries as diverse as Germany and Italy, England and the United States, and in doing so presents a century filled with science and superstition, revolutionaries and reactionaries, eros and anxiety - in short, an age of contradiction rendered remarkably clear by one of our most eloquent historians. Not since Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Narrative has a century been brought alive as dramatically. Schnitzler's Century is a tour de force, a work that tells us with remarkable lucidity how we came to be the way we are.