Stefan Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer who was one of the most popular writers in the 1920s and 1930s. Not only he had record sales, there was no other author more widely translated at that time. His experience of the First World War had made him a lifelong pacifist who advocated for the unification of Europe. While his stories about social and psychological crises such as gambling, prostitution, adultery, and suicide were emotionally rich, in his works, he usually avoided the irony or sarcasm often found in his letters. He is known for novellas such as 'Fear', 'Letter from an Unknown Woman', 'Amok', 'Confusion of Feelings', 'Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman', and 'The Royal Game', the novels 'Beware of Pity' and the posthumously published 'The Post Office Girl', dramas like 'Jeremiah', the memoir 'The World of Yesterday', and biographies of people including Erasmus of Rotterdam, Marie-Antoinette, Joseph Fouché, Ferdinand Magellan, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Balzac. Due to the corrosive anti-Jewish sentiments of the Nazis, he was forced to live much of his later life in exile around the world until he ended his life in 1942.