Franz Kafka, (born July 3, 1883, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary—died June 3, 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria), German-language writer. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in what is today the Czech Republic, he earned a doctorate at the University of Prague and then worked successfully but unhappily at an insurance company from 1907 until he was forced by a case of tuberculosis to retire in 1922. The disease caused his death two years later. Kafka published only a few works in his lifetime, including the novellas The Metamorphosis (1915) and In the Penal Colony (1919) and the story collection A Country Doctor (1919). His unfinished novels The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927), published posthumously against Kafka’s wishes by his friend Max Brod, express the anxieties and alienation of 20th-century humanity. His visionary tales, with their mixture of the normal and the fantastic, have provoked a wealth of interpretations. Kafka’s posthumous reputation and influence have been enormous, and he is regarded as one of the great European writers of the 20th century.
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