Carl E. Schorske, a professor and scholar whose collection of essays fixing turn-of-the-century Vienna as the radiating source of modernist thinking won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 and remains an exemplar of cultural history, died on Sunday in East Windsor, N.J. He was 100.

His death, at Meadow Lakes, a retirement community not far from Princeton, where Professor Schorske taught for many years, was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Edwards.

A polymath with a gift for communicating complex ideas straightforwardly, Professor Schorske was renowned for his lectures and classroom presence. In 1966, while at the University of California, Berkeley, he was one of 10 “great teachers” pictured on the cover of Time magazine. A 1969 article in the Princeton alumni magazine recalled that after the final lecture of his first course, students stood and applauded.

“He changed my life,” Michael S. Roth, who studied with Professor Schorske as a freshman at Wesleyan University in 1976 and is now its president, said in an interview on Tuesday. In a written remembrance, he called Professor Schorske “an extraordinary teacher — erudite, humane and sensitive to the different ways that students learned.” ...