Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, worked days at an insurance institute, and wrote nights at the kitchen table while the house slept. He asked that everything be burned. His friend Max Brod refused, and so the century received the trial, the castle, and a clerk named Gregor who woke changed.

He published little and doubted all of it. Few writers have been so wrong about their own worth, and few have been proved wrong so completely.

A tribute, kept by Here After All.

The work they left

In his lifetime, only the slim things: The Metamorphosis, with Gregor Samsa waking to his changed body, The Judgment, In the Penal Colony, A Hunger Artist. He asked his friend Max Brod to burn the rest. Brod refused, and so the world received The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, three unfinished novels that named the century's dread so precisely that his surname became the word for it.

His letters and diaries, the Letters to Milena and the Letter to His Father above all, are read as closely as the fiction now: the clearest record we have of a man watching himself write.