For most people who know his name at all, Stefan Zweig is the author of the autobiography Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (1944; translated as The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography, 1943) and several biographies written in a "faction" style that today seems much out of fashion. It is indeed difficult to believe that Zweig was one of the most widely read and translated authors of the first half of the twentieth century. His life was something of a paradox: he achieved what many writers never attain--public acknowledgment and material rewards--yet his was an unhappy existence that ended in suicide. Those acquainted with Zweig through his fiction, biographies, dramas, essays, and poetry tend to consider him a "man of yesterday," "European of yesterday," or "humanist of yesterday." "Yesterday" is the time in which Zweig lived, "yesterday" was the time for which he yearned, and "yesterday" was...