By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig had become the most widely translated living author in the world. His compelling novels, short stories, and biographies became instant best sellers. Zweig was an intellectual and a lover of all the arts, high and low. With Hitler"s rise to power, this celebrated writer plummeted, in a matter of a few years, into an increasingly isolated exile--from London to Bath to New York City, then Ossining, Rio, and finally Petropolis--where, in 1942, in a cramped bungalow, he killed himself. THE IMPOSSIBLE EXILE tells the tragic story of Zweig"s extraordinary rise and fall, while depicting with great acumen the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other. It also reveals how Zweig embodied, through his work, thoughts, and life, the end of an era: the implosion of Europe as an ideal of Western civilization.