Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in Prague on 3 July 1883, into a German-speaking Jewish family in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He trained in law and spent most of his working life in an insurance office, writing in the evenings and at night. His relationship with his domineering father, his uneasy sense of belonging, and his poor health shaped much of his inner life. He published only a small number of stories in his lifetime and left instructions that his remaining papers be destroyed. His friend Max Brod ignored this request and published the novels and other works after Kafka died of tuberculosis on 3 June 1924. His fiction presents ordinary people caught in puzzling, oppressive situations governed by rules they cannot grasp. The word Kafkaesque is now used for such experiences. He remains one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.