Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 into a German-speaking Jewish merchant family. His father, a self-made man, large and domineering, overshadowed his whole life; at thirty-six Kafka wrote him a hundred-page Letter to His Father, which he never sent. He took a doctorate in law at the University of Prague and then worked for fourteen years as an official at a semi-public workers' accident insurance institute, working by day and writing by night. He was engaged three times and three times broke off the engagement, and never married. In his lifetime he published only a few short works, and he died of tuberculosis at forty. On his deathbed he asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his manuscripts; Brod did not obey, but edited and published them, and Kafka became one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.