Critic, biographer, and dramatist. Best known for his play Jeremiah, and a biography of Marie Antoinette. He brought to his subjects great learning and a talent for breathing life into far-off places, persons, and times. An impassioned pacifist as well as a Jew, Zweig was forced to leave his native Austria when Hitler came to power. Although they had become British subjects, he and his wife fled to the New World during World War II. Overwhelmed by despair at the triumph of Nazism, Zweig and his wife committed suicide in Brazil in 1942.