The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography - Hardcover

Zweig, Stefan

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9780670788293: The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670788295 ISBN 13: 9780670788293

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1943

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Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that "was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history." Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about.

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About the Author

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was an Austrian novelist, journalist, biographer, and playwright prominent in the 1920s and 1930s. He is the author of several books, including the novels Beware of Pity and Confusion of Feelings and the biography Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan. Anthea Bell has translated many French, German, Danish, and Polish literary works into English. Her translations include Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoir The Pianist, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and numerous works of children's literature.

Review

"The autobiography of the internationally famous biographer and dramatist is a chronicle of three ages: the golden days of Vienna that ended with Word War I; that war and its aftermath; and the Hitler years. The three ages do come to life in Zweig's book."—Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly)

"The very success with which this book evokes both the beauty of the past and the fatality of its passing is what gives it tragic effectiveness. It is not so much a memoir of a life as it is the memento of an age, and the author seems, in his own phrase, to be the narrator at a illustrated lecture. The illustrations are provided by time, but his choice is brilliant and the narration is evocative."—The New Republic (The New Republic)

“When I opened it, I immediately felt that rare thrill one experiences when meeting a great book.”—Newsday.com

(Newsday.com)

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