Peter Viereck (1916–2006) was an American poet, political thinker, and professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. Viereck was born in New York City. He received his BA summa cum laude in history from Harvard University in 1937. He then specialized in European history, receiving his MA in 1939 and his PhD in 1942, again from Harvard. Viereck was prolific in his writing from 1938. He was a respected poet, with numerous published collections of poems and some poems first published in Poetry Magazine. He won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for the collection Terror and Decorum. In 1955 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Florence. Viereck passed away in 2006 at the age of 89.