Mendel the Bibliophile

The Viennese biographer, dramatist, poet, essayist, and novelist Stefan Zweig grew up in luxury and security in a wealthy, secular family in the last days of the Habsburg Empire. With the rise of Hitler, he moved to England in 1934 and then to the United States in 1940, but before the year was up, he left for Brazil, where, depressed by the collapse of European civilization, he committed suicide in 1942. His work was translated into many languages, and in the interwar years he was one of the most famous writers in the world. He was known particularly for his biographies of historical and literary figures (e.g., Marie Antoinette, Amerigo Vespucci, Honoré de Balzac) and for his novellas. His much-read autobiography The World of Yesterday (1943) is both praised as elegiac and condemned as naïve.