Stefan Zweig was born November 28, 1881, in Vienna, Austria into a family of wealthy industrialist. He studied in Austria, France, and Germany, earning his doctoral degree at the University of Vienna. After a short stop as literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse under Theaodor Herzl, Stefan Zweig became a most prolific and widely read critic and author of novels, biographies, plays, etc. In 1913 he settled in Salzburg, getting married to Friderike von Winternitz in 1914. During World War I he worked in the archives of the Austrian Armed Forces and became afterwards one of the great proponents of peaceful coexistence in Europe, living in Salzburg and travelling widely. After Austria’s Anschluss to Nazi Germany in 1938, Zweig became a British citizen, and in 1940, after a lecture tour in South America, he settled in Brazil. Disillusioned and isolated, Zweig committed suicide with his second wife, Charlotte E. Altmann, in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro on February 23, 1942.