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 He died of tuberculosis in 1924, relatively unknown, leaving instructions for his friend Max Brod to burn the unpublished manuscripts. Brod refused, and published The Trial and The Castle posthumously, releasing work that fused realism with the surreal and gave the world a new word for bureaucratic absurdity.