Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a Czech-Jewish writer whose 18-year writing career produced multiple foundational documents of early-20th-century international modernist literature — particularly his 1915 short novel The Metamorphosis, his 1925 posthumously-published novel The Trial, and his 1926 posthumously-published novel The Castle. He was born Franz Kafka on July 3, 1883, in Prague, Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (modern Czech Republic), into a Czech-Jewish middle-class family. His father Hermann Kafka was a Czech-Jewish dry-goods merchant, and his mother Julie Löwy was a Czech-Jewish homemaker. His ongoing 1900s and 1910s biographical narrative was shaped by his troubled relationship with his domineering father (which he chronicled in his 1919 autobiographical "Letter to His Father").

His education at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague (Doctor of Law, 1906) launched his early-career path. His 1907–1908 first commercial-employment career as a Prague-area Italian-insurance-business clerk and his subsequent 1908–1922 career as a Prague-area Workers' Accident Insurance Institute insurance-claims-and-statistics-management bureaucrat produced his early-career biographical narrative. He worked at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute across his entire 14-year insurance-bureaucracy career.

His 1908 first published commercial-fiction prose narrative "Description of a Struggle" — across the Prague-area German-language literary magazine Hyperion — launched his early-career Prague-Jewish-German-language modernist-literature public profile. His subsequent 1910s German-language literary career produced multiple short stories — particularly his 1912 short novella The Judgment, his 1913 short novella The Stoker, and his 1915 short novella The Metamorphosis.

His 1915 short novella The Metamorphosis — released October 1915 by the Leipzig-area German-language literary publisher Kurt Wolff Verlag — produced one of the foundational documents of early-20th-century international modernist literature. The novella's opening line — "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect" — has been continuously cited as one of the foundational opening lines of early-20th-century international modernist literature.

His subsequent 1917 tuberculosis diagnosis (at age 34) and his ongoing 1917–1924 ongoing tuberculosis-related illness shaped his later biographical narrative. His will to his close friend Max Brod (across which he requested that Brod burn all his unpublished manuscripts after his death) — and Brod's 1924–1926 decision to publish those unpublished manuscripts (which produced the 1925 novel The Trial, the 1926 novel The Castle, and the 1927 novel America) — produced his 20th-century international modernist-literature public profile. He died on June 3, 1924, at age 40, in the Kierling sanatorium near Vienna, Austria, of tuberculosis-related complications.

His name Franz is the German form of Francis (from the Latin Franciscus meaning "Frenchman"). Franz has been climbing in American naming since the 2010s.