The World of Yesterday

This Plunkett Lake Press eBook is produced by arrangement with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.


The World of Yesterday, mailed to his publisher a few days before Stefan Zweig took his life in 1942, has become a classic of the memoir genre. Originally titled "Three Lives," the memoir describes Vienna of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, the world between the two world wars and the Hitler years.


"The best single memoir of Old Vienna by any of the city's native artists." — Clive James


"A book that should be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in the creative imagination and the intellectual life, the brute force of history upon individual lives, the possibility of culture and, quite simply, what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942." — The Guardian


"It is not so much a memoir of a life as it is the memento of an age." — The New Republic