Franz Kafka

Who is Franz Kafka?

Franz Kafka was a German-language writer born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a German-speaking Jewish family. Trained as a lawyer, he worked for most of his life at a workers' accident insurance institute in Prague while writing fiction in his spare time, publishing relatively little during his lifetime. His major works, including the novels "The Trial" and "The Castle," and the novella "The Metamorphosis," explore themes of alienation, bureaucratic absurdity, guilt, and existential anxiety, giving rise to the term "Kafkaesque" to describe surreal, nightmarish bureaucratic situations. Kafka wrote in German but lived his entire life in Prague, deeply shaped by the city's multicultural and multilingual atmosphere. He suffered from tuberculosis in his final years and died in 1924 at age forty, largely unrecognized outside a small circle of friends. Before his death, he asked his friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts; Brod instead published them, and Kafka's work went on to become among the most influential in twentieth-century world literature.

Sources: Franz Kafka, The Trial (published posthumously, 1925) · Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915) · Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography (1937)