Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 into a German-speaking Jewish family, the son of a domineering merchant father whose shadow fell across much of his writing. He earned a doctorate in law and spent his working life at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, writing at night. Quiet, exacting, and self-doubting, he published only a handful of stories during his lifetime.

His fiction transformed private anxiety into universal parable. The Metamorphosis opens with Gregor Samsa transformed into a monstrous insect; The Trial follows Josef K. through a prosecution whose charge is never revealed; The Castle traces a man's futile effort to reach an unreachable authority. Written in precise, unadorned German, these works capture the estrangement of the individual before family, bureaucracy, and law with unsettling calm.

Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, shortly before his forty-first birthday, and was buried in Prague. He had asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts; Brod instead published them, giving the world The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika. Few writers so obscure in life have mattered so much after death. His name became an adjective, and his vision a lens for the modern condition.