Franz Kafka Biography

Austrian Novelist and Writer, Noted for The Metamorphosis and Trial

Jul 3, 2008
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Franz Kafka, Czech Writer of The Trial - Atelier Jacobi,1906, Wikimedia Commons

Brief biography of Austrian author Franz Kafka, famous for short story "The Metamorphosis" and novel The Trial, whose heroes are victims of an indifferent society.

Austrian novelist Franz Kafka's works, strange and disturbing, have had a great influence on 20th-century Western literature, including such writers as Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett. He is best known for "The Metamorphosis" and The Trial.

His portrayal of the world is one of a schizophrenic society in which his heroes are often victims of an impersonal world.

Early Years of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague (now in the Czech Republic, then part of Austria). The son of German-Jewish parents, he was a shy and hypersensitive man who lived with his parents for most of his short life. He studied law at the German University in Prague although his passion was writing. His break came when he got a job writing reports on industrial accidents and health hazards. The only time he had for creative writing was in the evenings.

Although very much attached to his father, he eventually moved to Berlin with Dora Dymant in 1923, before he succumbed to lung cancer the following year.

Kafka: The Writer and His Theme

Some of Kafka's early stories were published when he was 26 years old. In the summer of 1912 he wrote the two short stories, "The Judgement" and "The Metamorphosis," that established his importance as a writer. "The Metamorphosis" became Kafka's most famous short story. It is about a man who wakes to find that he has been transformed overnight into a giant insect.

Both stories feature a theme common to all his work: a lonely victim who suffers persecution for a crime he does not understand. This theme is carried further in Kafka's most famous novel, The Trial, in which the hero, Joseph K., is unaware of the offence for which he is persecuted and finally executed. This ideas has been described as an allegory for the bewilderment felt by many people living in the modern world.

Kafka's Later Years

Kafka refused to allow any of his three novels to be published during is lifetime and left instructions to his friend Max Brod that all his manuscripts should be burned after his death. Fortunately for literature, Brod decided to publish the manuscripts posthumously, and translated by Edwin and Willa Muir. A number of his other writings have also been published posthumously. He died at the age of 40, on June 3, 1923. His surrealist humour shows influence in his predecessors Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes.

Works by Franz Kafka