Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, when the city was part of Austria-Hungary, into a German-speaking Jewish family. His father ran a shop and dominated the household, and their difficult relationship marks much of Kafka's writing. He earned a law doctorate at the German university in Prague in 1906. From 1908 to 1922 he worked at a workers' accident insurance institute. He wrote at night and felt that his job kept him from his true work.

Few of his works appeared while he lived. The best known is The Metamorphosis (1915), in which a traveling salesman wakes up as a huge insect and becomes a burden to his family. His novels The Trial and The Castle show people caught in systems they cannot understand or escape. The word "Kafkaesque" comes from these books.

Kafka got tuberculosis in 1917 and died in a sanatorium near Vienna in 1924, aged 40. He had asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts. Brod refused and published The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927), and Kafka became widely read only after his death.