Stefan Zweig

Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1881, Zweig made his name with psychological studies of literary giants like Balzac and Dostoevsky in Drei Meister (1920) and biographies of figures from Fouché to Marie Antoinette. His fiction - Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922), Beware of Pity (1939), The Royal Game (1941) - dealt in hidden feeling and moral vertigo. When the Nazis rose and Austria turned Ständestaat in 1934, he left for England, then New York, then Brazil, writing lovingly of his new country in Brazil, Land of the Future. But exile hollowed him. On 22 February 1942, he and his wife Lotte died of barbiturate overdose in their house in Petrópolis. His memoir The World of Yesterday, published that year, captured the lost shimmer of the Habsburg Empire and became its most famous epitaph.