Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 – February 22, 1942) was an Austrian writer and essayist of Jewish background. He was one of the most prominent European writers of the early 20th century.

Biography
Zweig was born in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Ida Breitauer (1854–1938), the daughter of a Jewish banking family, and Moritz Zweig (1845–1926), a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer.

Zweig studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and in 1904 received his doctorate with a thesis on “The Philosophy of Hippolyte Taine”.

Zweig married Friederike Maria von Winternitz (born Burger) in 1920 and they divorced in 1938. Friederike published a book about her former husband after his death, and later published a second illustrated book about Zweig. In the late summer of 1939, Zweig married his secretary, Elisabeth Charlotte “Lotte” Altmann, in Bath, England.

Zweig achieved international fame in the 1920s and 1930s, was a friend of Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud, and was very popular in the United States, South America, and continental Europe (except in Britain, where he was not widely read).

At one point, his works were published in English without his consent under the pseudonym “Stephen Branch” (an English translation of his family name Zweig) when anti-German sentiment was on the rise.