Stefan Zweig is a classic of Austrian literature, the author of magnificent psychological novellas and fictionalized biographies translated into all languages. His biographies combine artistic beauty of style with historical fidelity. This edition includes captivating biographies of three writers who, in the author's words, are 'the only great novelists of the nineteenth century'—Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. Explaining his choice, Zweig writes: 'A novelist in the final, highest sense is only an encyclopedic genius, a comprehensive artist who... constructs an entire cosmos and contrasts the earthly world with his own world, with its own types, its own laws of gravity, and its own starry sky... Each of these artists, in the abundance of images he creates, reveals a certain sense of life, a certain law of life, so unified and integral that it becomes a new form of the world.' The book also includes the famous essay on the life of the great Renaissance humanist, 'The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam.'