Stefan Zweig

Zweig grew up in an assimilated, wealthy Viennese Jewish family, moved easily among Rilke, Freud, and Romain Rolland, and became, by the 1920s, one of the most translated writers alive: a virtuoso of the novella who found whole tragedies in a single overheated hour, a chance encounter, a hidden letter, an unbearable secret.

He fled Austria after the Anschluss, first to London, then to New York and finally Brazil, watching the Europe he'd loved dismantled from exile. Beware of Pity (1939), his only finished novel, follows an officer's well-meaning kindness toward a paralyzed girl curdling into catastrophe: pity as its own kind of cruelty.

Chess Story, written in his final months in Petrópolis, pits an obsessive world champion against a man who kept his sanity in Gestapo custody by replaying grandmaster games in his mind. Weeks after finishing it, in February 1942, despairing of Europe's future, Zweig and his wife Lotte took their own lives.