Franz Kafka
1883–1924 3 entries
Biography
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking writer from Prague whose stories of lonely people caught in systems they cannot understand gave the world the word “Kafkaesque”. He was born in 1883 into a Jewish merchant family, studied law and worked for most of his life at an insurance institute for workers’ accidents, writing at night. His difficult relationship with his domineering father, which he set out in the long Letter to His Father, runs through much of his work.
During his lifetime he published only a few short works, among them The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa wakes one morning transformed into a monstrous insect. Ill with tuberculosis, he asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death; Brod refused and published the novels The Trial, The Castle and Amerika. Kafka died in 1924 in a sanatorium near Vienna, at forty, and is buried in Prague. Today he is counted among the most important writers of the twentieth century.
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