Happy Birthday Stefan Zweig (1881-1942)

It's hard to imagine that this Viennese novelist, poet, biographer, playwright, and journalist was once the world's most popular writer, selling more books in more countries than any other. Today, he is all but forgotten except among a few aficionados, including me (and The Guardian's literary critic Nicholas Lezard, see here). Zweig's novels and novellas have an honored place in my library but, truth be told, my favorite of all his works is his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, which is equally a history of the times in which he lived. Like his great French friend Romain Rolland, Zweig was a cosmopolitan, pan-European humanist of the fin de siecle, who increasingly felt out of place in the war-torn Europe of the twentieth century. Born a Jew, he managed to escape Austria shortly after Hitler's rise to power in Germany. He fled to South America. But he found he could not escape the psychological effects of the destruction of the Europe he knew, and he committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 (along with his second wife, Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann).