Franz Kafka was a Prague-born, German-Jewish novelist and short-story writer. He is best known for his signature literary sensibility, which combines the styles of realism, absurdism, surrealism, and humor with thematic interests in alienation, guilt, existentialism, and oppressive bureaucracy. His most widely read books are The Trial, The Castle, and The Metamorphosis, the last of which depicts a man who wakes up one morning to discover that he has transformed into a giant insect.
Born to a middle-class family in the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia (known today as the Czech Republic), Kafka pursued a legal education before working at an insurance company. Because of his full-time work at the company, Kafka composed his oeuvre largely in his spare time.
Kafka was mostly unpublished and unrecognized during his lifetime. Most of Kafka's works were published by his friend and literary executor Max Brod after Kafka's death from tuberculosis. Despite Kafka's request that Brod burn his letters, diaries, and unfinished manuscripts for novels including The Trial, Amerika, and The Man Who Disappeared, Brod compiled, edited, and published most of Kafka's writing in his possession. Kafka's posthumous publications led to widespread popularity and established his prominence as one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century literature.
Amerika is the first novel written by Franz Kafka, but remained incomplete until Kafka's death and was only published posthumously. The German book was released three years after Kafka's death in 1927 although the first English translation was not...
“A Country Doctor” was initially published in its original German in Franz Kafka’s collection of stories Ein Landartz: Kleine Erzählungen in 1919. An English translation first appeared in the 1945 in the volume The Country Doctor: A Collection of...
Kafka wrote the short story "A Hunger Artist" in 1922. He combined it with three other stories for the collection A Hunger Artist, which was published soon after his death in 1924.
All four stories in some way detail the negotiations of artists...
Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" ("In der Strafkolonie" in the original German) is a cornerstone of existentialist writing which centers on themes of religion, colonialism, and torture. It is notable for its flat, unaffected tone, with a...
Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis in 1912, the year he felt his creativity finally taking a definite form. It was one of fairly few works Kafka was to publish in his lifetime. In 1913 he turned down an offer to publish the story, possibly because he...
Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial is about Josef K., a banker who is prosecuted by a court he has never heard of for a crime that is never revealed. Although K. attempts to fight the illogical accusation, the perplexing legal system steadily...
