Stefan Zweig, recognized as one of the greatest biographers of all time, examines with his usual insight and subtlety the lives and works of three great writers, fascinated by Tolstoy's lucidity, Casanova's impartiality, and Stendhal's ambiguity. He considers all three "poets of their lives" since all of them made their life experience and their biography literary material. But while Casanova spoke of himself in an almost naive and anecdotal way, to the delight of the reader, the "egocentric" Stendhal did so with the clairvoyance of a psychologist capable of dismantling the alibis of his own psyche, and Tolstoy, finally, transformed the autobiography in an authentic spiritual, ethical and religious search. A work that guides us through the books of three classics to discover that the best literature is a great revealer of the profound truths of the human soul.