The factors that dictate and change the course of history are primarily the product of the contributions made by individual lives to the broad pattern of mortal existence. In his collection of "history miniatures", Stefan Zweig celebrates the monumental power of the spirit to discover, to create, to transcend the limits imposed by the temporal and physical environment, while at the same time underlining man's inability to escape from the realities in a single night, a love affair between a seventy-four-year-old poet and a nineteen-year-old girl, and a man who legally owned much of the state of California, only to have it taken from him because the government would not defend his rights.

Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881. During his literary career he produced poetry, dramas, and narrative prose, but achieved his greatest acclaim as the writer of lively biographies of cultural and creative personalities in European history and literature, as well as essays and significant reminiscences about life and culture in the Austrian monarchy. He committed suicide in Brazil in 1942.