About
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German language Jewish Czech writer and novelist born in Prague, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his work fuses elements of realism and the fantastique, and typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe grotesquely ludicrous encounters with eerily baffling administrative procedures like those depicted in his writing. The domain of mystical parables overlaps with the alienating experience of urban life's indecipherable complexities in Kafka's stories. His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926).