For 30 years, I have read it and reread it, never losing my admiration. With his "great Balzac," as he called it himself, Stefan Zweig aimed to distill the sum of his literary experience, to write biography and criticism in one, "to leave something valid behind, a work that would endure for several decades." In the spring of 1939, he began writing it in London; when he moved to the USA in June of the following year and shortly thereafter to Brazil, he left behind 600 pages of manuscript, 2000 pages of notes, and 400 marked books. He was unable to complete this life novel, conceived as his Magnum Opus - Richard Friedenthal, a friend, posthumously edited the "essentially complete book" with great empathy and meticulous care for its publication in 1946 by Bermann-Fischer Verlag.