Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was an Austrian novelist and biographer. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna, he became widely read for novellas that trace sudden psychological transformations and for biographies portraying major historical figures and events. Zweig championed cultural exchange and European unity, but the rise of Nazism forced him into exile in Britain, the United States, and finally Brazil. In his memoir “The World of Yesterday,” he follows European life from prewar Vienna through two world wars and his own displacement, recording the destruction of the cosmopolitan culture in which he had grown up.
