Stefan Zweig

Austrian · 1881–1942

Austrian novelist, playwright, and biographer who was, in the 1920s and 30s, one of the most widely translated writers in the world. Born into a wealthy Viennese Jewish family, Zweig wrote psychologically acute novellas (Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok, Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman) and popular biographies of figures including Marie Antoinette, Erasmus, Montaigne, Balzac, and Nietzsche. His memoir The World of Yesterday mourns the cosmopolitan European culture destroyed by the rise of fascism. Driven into exile by the Nazis, he settled briefly in England and the United States before moving to Brazil, where in 1942 he and his second wife took their own lives. The Royal Game (also published as Chess Story) was his final completed work, written in Brazilian exile and sent to his publisher days before his death.

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