Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3, 1883, into a middle-class Jewish family. He graduated with a law degree in 1906 from the Charles University of Prague and worked at the Workers’ Accident Insu... Read more
Franz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3, 1883, into a middle-class Jewish family. He graduated with a law degree in 1906 from the Charles University of Prague and worked at the Workers’ Accident Insurance institution until 1922, when he was forced to leave because of his tuberculosis. Although none of his novels were published during his life, Kafka did publish some of his shorter fiction, including “Meditation” (1913), “The Judgment” (1913), “The Metamorphosis” (1915), “The Penal Colony” (1919), “The Country Doctor” (1919), and “A Hunger Artist” (1924), which focused on the guilt and anxiety of an outsider and combined the real world and the dream world. After Kafka’s death in 1924, his friend Max Brod ignored his instructions to destroy his unprinted manuscripts. Brod published much of Kafka’s unpublished works, including the fragmentary novels “The Trial” (1925), “The Castle” (1926), and “Amerika” (1927), written in 1913.