Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a German-language Jewish Czech writer and novelist born in Prague in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, widely regarded as a major figure of twentieth-century literature. His works fuse realism with the fantastic, typically following isolated protagonists confronting bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible bureaucratic powers, a quality the term Kafkaesque now describes. His best-known works are the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926); trained as a lawyer, he wrote largely in private, and most of his work was published posthumously by his friend and literary executor Max Brod after Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924.