Gabor Boritt was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. He spent his early years playing on floors stained with blood while the Nazis forced his family into a single room within a hospital on the edge of the ghetto.
Gabor Boritt fled toward the Austrian border through darkness as a sixteen-year-old participant in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He hiked wooded hills until reaching no man's land guarded by men in watchtowers before running for freedom across machine gun fire.
Gabor Boritt earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yankton College in 1962. He received a master's degree from the University of South Dakota in 1963 and a Ph.D. from Boston University in 1968.
Gabor Boritt published his first book on Lincoln in 1978 which placed what he called the right to rise at the center of Lincoln's outlook. A 1995 survey listed this book among the ten most important works ever written about Lincoln.
On the 17th of November 2008 President Bush awarded Gabor Boritt the National Humanities Medal. The citation honored his distinguished career of scholarship on Lincoln and the Civil War era.