Franz Kafka

Born in 1883 in Prague to a German-speaking Jewish family, Kafka lived under the domineering shadow of his father Hermann, a self-made businessman whose physical vitality and social confidence made Franz feel perpetually inadequate. He earned a law degree and spent his working life as an insurance clerk at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, writing almost exclusively at night. He was engaged three times, twice to the same woman, Felice Bauer, but never married, sabotaging each relationship with agonized letters and retreat. During his lifetime he published only a handful of short works, including The Metamorphosis (1915) and A Hunger Artist (1922). His three unfinished novels, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, were left in notebooks with instructions to his friend Max Brod to burn everything after his death. Brod refused, and their publication transformed world literature. Kafka died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna in 1924, at forty, unable to eat or drink in his final days. The word "Kafkaesque" has since entered every major language as shorthand for the surreal entrapment of modern life.