Merle Curti; Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian

Merle Curti, 98, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and American history scholar. A graduate of Harvard University, where he received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, Curti was a faculty member of the University of Wisconsin’s history department for 26 years. In 1944, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history for “The Growth of American Thought,” an intellectual history of America. Curti wrote more than 20 books on topics such as education, immigration, ethnicity and history, and served as a visiting professor at a number of colleges and universities, including UC Berkeley and Caltech. He was named a Knight of the North Star by the King of Sweden for his contributions to Swedish-American intellectual relations, and he served three years as an honorary consultant in American cultural history to the Library of Congress. The Organization of American Historians awards an annual Merle Curti Prize to the author of an outstanding work in American social or intellectual history. In Madison, Wis., on Saturday.