Austrian · 1881–1942
Austrian novelist and biographer who was the most translated author in the world during the 1930s. Born into a wealthy Viennese family, Zweig wrote novellas of psychological intensity—Letter from an Unknown Woman, Chess Story, Confusion of Feelings—alongside popular biographies of Marie Antoinette, Erasmus, and Magellan. His memoir The World of Yesterday mourned prewar European civilization. A Jewish exile, he fled Austria for England, then Brazil, where he and his wife took their lives in 1942. His novellas have been rediscovered; the prose cuts to emotional nerve.