marie antoinette the portrait of an average woman stefan zweig

Zweig’s considerable output as a poet, the genre in which he first rose to prominence and fame in early twentieth-century Vienna, is yet to receive its first book-length rendition into English. Of Zweig’s dramatic works, the only extant English translation, the wartime play Jeremiah (1917), is currently out of print. Among them are classical novellas such as Confusion (which delighted Sigmund Freud), Amok, and Letter from an Unknown Woman essay volumes that comprise Zweig’s travel writings and political commentaries (such as Journeys and Europe on the Brink) and a new translation of his immensely popular compilation of history snapshots, Shooting Stars: Ten Historical Miniatures, which focuses on such world-changing events as the first telegraph message cabled from to Newfoundland to Valentia Island, Ireland, or the rediscovery of George Frideric Händel. Owing in part to the efforts of the British-based publishing house Pushkin Press, there is a plethora of Zweig’s works currently available in English, much of it translated by the award-winning translator Anthea Bell, and much of it focused on Zweig’s narrative output from the 1920s, the period when, according to one study published at the time, he constituted the world’s most translated author. Zweig's best-known fiction includes Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922), Amok (1922), Fear (1925), Confusion (1927), Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927), the psychological novel Ungeduld des Herzens ( Beware of Pity, 1939), and The Royal Game (1941). He wrote biographies of Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935) and Marie Antoinette ( Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, 1932), among others. He wrote historical studies of famous literary figures, such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky in Drei Meister (1920 Three Masters), and decisive historical events in Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928 published in English in 1940 as The Tide of Fortune: Twelve Historical Miniatures).

Zweig was raised in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and most popular writers in the world. Stefan Zweig (28 November 1881 – 22 February 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer.

Marie antoinette the portrait of an average woman stefan zweig