Franz Kafka

Kafka was born in 1883 into a middle-class German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He trained as a lawyer and spent his working life in insurance and legal positions, though he felt his true calling was writing — a tension that ran through him. Most of what he wrote stayed private: letters to family and friends, stories published in small magazines that drew little notice. Contemplation appeared in 1912, A Country Doctor in 1919, The Metamorphosis in 1915 as a novella in a journal. He became engaged more than once but never married. He died of tubercu…