Contains alphabetically arranged entries that provide career biographies of fifty German, Austrian, and Swiss-German writers, most of whom had their first significant work published or performed after World War I; each with a list of principal works and a bibliography. Includes a cumulative index.

Essays on twentieth-century French playwrights who were largely influenced by non-French traditions, during the greatest age of French theater since the mid 1700s. French drama of the twentieth-century was cosmopolitan, experimental and eclectic and attempted to appeal to a wider audience than in the past. Dramatists came not only from Paris but from the provinces and the French states of the Caribbean as well as from Francophone countries such as Belgium.

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that "was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history." Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about.

Stefan Zweig’s literary portraits of three tormented giants of German literature, Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche, contrasts them with Goethe who was anchored in place by profession, home and family. For Zweig, “everyone whose nature excels the commonplace, everyone whose impulses are creative, wrestles inevitably with his daemon” which Zweig describes as “the incorporation of that tormenting leaven which impels our being ... towards danger, immoderation, ecstasy, renunciation and even self-destruction.” In these essays, Zweig depicts the tragic and sublime lifelong struggle by three great creative minds with their respective daemons.

In these early 20th century literary essays, Stefan Zweig offers a Central European view of the writers he believed to be the “three greatest novelists” of the 19th century: Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. In Zweig’s view, Balzac set out to emulate his childhood hero Napoleon. Writing 20 hours a day, Balzac’s literary ambition was “tantamount to monomania in its persistence, its intensity, and its concentration.” His characters, each similarly driven by one desperate urge, were more vital to Balzac than people in his daily life. In Zweig’s reading, Dickens embodied Victorian England and its “bourgeois smugness”. His characters aspire to “A few hundred pounds a year, an amiable wife, a dozen children, a well-appointed table and succulent meats to entertain their friends with, a cottage not too far from London, the windows giving a view over the green countryside, a pretty little garden, and a modicum of happiness.” The ideal of middle-class respectability suffuses Dickens’ fiction. Dostoevsky drew on the struggles of his own life to illuminate the contradictions of the human soul. In Zweig’s view, his heroes had no desire to be citizens or ordinary human beings. While Balzac’s heroes “would gladly have subjugated the world, Dostoevsky’s heroes wished to transcend it.”

Essays on American sportswriters, for which some are the first studies to appear anywhere. Discusses the styles of sportswriting employed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Includes information on twentieth-century authors who crossed over from"serious" literature to sportswriting, as well as the history of sportswriting.

Conrad Kain’s letters provide insights into the life and thoughts of this exemplary Austrian-Canadian mountaineer.