Personal Information: Family: Born November 28, 1881, in Vienna, Austria; immigrated to England, 1934, became a naturalized citizen, 1940; committed suicide, February 22, 1942, in Petropolis, Brazil; son of Moritz (a textile manufacturer) and Ida Brettauer Zwieg; married Friderike Maria Burger von Winternitz (a writer), in 1919 (divorced); married Elisabeth Charlotte Altmann, in 1939. Education: University of Vienna, studied German and Romance literatures, earned doctorate in 1904. Politics: Pacifist. Religion: Jewish. Hobbies and other interests: Collecting literary and musical manuscripts.

Career: Novelist, biographer, playwright, poet, and critic. Military service: Worked in the Austrian War Archives during World War I.

One of the most widely translated authors of his day, Austrian native Stefan Zweig wrote poetry, novellas, biographies, plays, and criticism. However, his literary legacy has been obscured by certain events and criticism that marked his career. In the politically charged atmosphere of Europe during World Wars I and II, Zweig was sometimes maligned for being a pacifist who would not join in open condemnation of Fascism and a Jew who did not show solidarity with his people. In fact, the events of World War II devastated Zweig, who was passionately dedicated to promoting an intellectually unified Europe. He saw the war as proof that his ideals would never be achieved, and in a dual suicide by poison with his second wife, ended his life in despair. While his varied publications were extremely popular during his lifetime, they fell out of fashion soon after his death. Zweig's works have been treated as modern classics in Germany and continued to be read in South America, but they lost their larger English-reading audience. It was not until the 1980s that a renewed critical interest developed and his body of work began to be reevaluated.

Zweig was born into wealth in Vienna as the son of a successful textile manufacturer. While he hated the authoritarian schools he attended as a child, Zweig learned to love the arts and was a voracious reader. As a young man Zweig published the volume of poetry Silbern Saiten (title means "Silver Strings") in 1901, and he became known as one of the literary group Young Vienna. He went on to study German and Romance literatures at the University of Vienna, earning his doctorate in 1904. This work had been interrupted, however, when Zweig met the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren and embarked on a two-year project translating his poetry into German. Thus, Verhaeren become one of Zweig's greatest literary influences, with his philosophy of humanism and positive outlook. Zweig's other great mentor was French writer Romain Rolland, another humanist, and a pacifist who sought European unity.

Prior to the start of World War I in 1914, Zweig traveled extensively, visiting China, India, Africa, and North America. During this time he also became acquainted with the leading intellectual figures of Europe. When war broke out, he went to work in the Austrian War Archives, but he also found time to write a play. Jeremias, an anti-war drama, premiered in neutral Switzerland in 1917.

Zweig moved to Salzburg in 1919, where he and his first wife, writer Friderike Maria Burger von Winternitz, played host to many important cultural figures. The couple numbered Sigmund Freud, Hermann Hesse, and Arturo Toscanini among their friends and associates. It is important to note, however, that Zweig carefully avoided being associated with any group, including pan-European organizations. Zweig also spent time creating an impressive collection of literary and musical manuscripts. In Salzburg, Zweig was productive and happy, developing a multi-faceted career. As scholar Harry Zohn noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, he had become "a translator in a wider and higher sense, a man who strove to inform, educate, inspire, and arouse appreciation and enthusiasm across literary, cultural, political, and personal boundaries."

Several tragic events marred Zweig's experiences as a playwright and made him wary of the genre. Four deaths hindered productions of his plays, and as a result the prolific Zweig wrote only eight plays. Jeremias is Zweig's best-known original drama; the author used the biblical story of Jeremiah, who is selected by God to deliver a message of peace, to show the spiritual superiority of the defeated. The play was well received by critics and when it reached the United States after the end of the war, a New York Times Book Review critic asserted the drama's importance was not just due to the current political climate: "The scale and sweep of Zweig's tragedy, its vivid characterization and the fervor and loftiness of its diction, would have attracted attention at any time." Zweig's 1925 adaptation of Ben Jonson's Elizabethan play Volpone was also a dramatic success internationally. This was a rare comedic turn for Zweig, who otherwise rarely used humor or irony in his writings.

As a writer of fiction, Zweig mastered the short novella form, but only completed one novel during his lifetime. His novellas most often were careful psychological explorations of individuals who were experiencing violent emotions and were gripped by an obsession. These works comprised several collections, including the translations Passion and Pain and Kaleidoscope. On the occasion of reviewing this second collection, New Republic writer Barthold Fles reflected, "always [Zweig] remains essentially the same, revealing in all . . . mediums his subtlety of style, his profound psychological knowledge and his inherent humaneness." Taken individually, Zweig's notable novelettes include Letter from an Unknown Woman, which New York Times Book Review writer Harold Strauss saw as having "all the richness and force of a full-bodied novel, and [adding] to that a delicacy entirely its own, a high point in the development of the short narrative form." Zweig's last novelette, The Royal Game, is also considered one of his best in its depiction of a released Nazi prisoner who, having kept himself same by playing chess against himself, goes mad when drawn into a real game with a chess master.

The author's best-received works, however, were his psychological biographies. Zweig recreated the lives of historical figures such as Erasmus, Magellan, George Frederick Handel, and Mary Stuart. He did exhaustive historical research, particularly for the highly popular Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman. Herbert Gorman's New York Times Book Review article on this work noted, "[Zweig] possesses a dogged psychological curiosity, a brutal frankness, a supreme impartiality and had access to hitherto unused documentation. The result of this concentration of talents is a full-bodied and frank exposition." A number of Zweig's biographies were comparative works that focused on multiple figures, such as Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky, Mental Healers: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, and The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin. Zweig's vivid narration and imaginative presentation of personalities earned him many readers, but his biographical works were also criticized for being melodramatic and politically naive.

The year 1934 was a pivotal period in Zweig's life, for political tensions in Europe began to bear directly on his life. He completed a collaboration with Richard Strauss, writing the libretto for the opera Die schweigsame Frau. Because Strauss served as the president of the Reich Music Chamber, the opera came under the scrutiny of the Nazi regime. Having intercepted a warm letter from the composer to his Jewish librettist, officials canceled the opera's production after four performances and Strauss was removed from his position. That same year, Zweig's home was searched by police looking for weapons hidden by a socialist organization. Zweig became restless and uneasy in his beloved home and he soon moved to the safety of England.

Zweig's transplantation, however, did not proceed smoothly. His wife, upon whom he relied in all domestic and practical matters, remained in Salzburg, arranging the disposition of their home and belongings. Meanwhile, Zweig met Elisabeth Charlotte Altmann, who became his secretary. The married couple remained apart for several years and their relationship disintegrated. Zweig married Altmann in England in 1939. Through all of these events, the writer was beset with depression and guilt about leaving his homeland. He remained ill at ease in England and sought escape in travel.

In 1940 Zweig traveled to the United States and then to South America, where he applied for a permanent visa in Brazil. He had just become a British citizen, but believed that his possessions in England had been destroyed by the war. He began to write his autobiography, The World of Yesterday. This volume rivals all of Zweig's former work in its literary impact. According to Ruth V. Gross in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "the text is so vividly evocative and the sense of loss so palpable that the persona that emerges--an Austrian who has outlived his age--became the Stefan Zweig that people remembered." In fact, The World of Yesterday served as a timely post script to Zweig's life, being published a year after his death. He took poison with his wife on February 23, 1942, leaving a suicide note expressing the wish that his friends would see the end of the horrors that had crushed him.

A number of Zweig's other writings were published posthumously, including some unfinished novels. One such novel was Clarissa, which its editor Knut Beck deemed a fictional variation on Zweig's autobiography. Reviewed in World Literature Today, Harry Zohn called it "absorbing enough, but what we have here is not vintage Zweig; once again one suspects that the novel was not this writer's favorite form." Several volumes of Zweig's correspondence with figures such as Sigmund Freud, Hermann Hesse, Romain Rolland, Martin Buber, and many others have been published, as have his diaries and notebooks in a volume titled Tagebucher. Zohn marveled at the diaries in World Literature Today: "That so much hitherto unknown material should have surfaced more than four decades after the author's death is one of the minor mysteries of the literary scene."

Among Zweig's works to be reissued during the 1980s were his autobiography and the translated novel Beware of Pity. Writing for the Times Literary Supplement, Peter Kemp was fascinated by The World of Yesterday; he commented on the impersonal narrative technique--Zweig himself compared it to being an "intellectual lecturer"--saying, "the result is as informative as this would suggest--and far more elegant and alluring. As much the history of a generation and a continent as of an individual. . . . Zweig makes his book a triumph of long perspectives and wide horizons." Kemp concluded, "Zweig's story . . . is an unwaveringly civilized account of a civilization's collapse." Beware of Pity elicited conflicting reviews. S. S. Prawer, knowing the pitiable circumstances of Zweig's last years, reluctantly remarked that "page after wordy page . . . [made] one realize why Musil was so scornful of his compatriot Zweig and why the anti-novel had to be invented." Spectator reviewer P. J. Kavanagh had an entirely different reaction to the novel, and called it "a profound book but easy to read, and enthralling, which is a rare combination."