Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) was one of the major German-language novelists and short story writers of the twentieth century, whose unique body of writing—much of it incomplete and published posthumously despite his wish that it be destroyed has become iconic in Western literature.

His most famous pieces of writing include his short story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) and his two novels, Der Prozess (The Trial) and the unfinished novel Das Schloß (The Castle). Kafka's work expresses the essential absurdity of modern society, especially the impersonal nature of bureaucracy and capitalism. The individual in Kafka's texts is alone and at odds with the society around him, which seems to operate in a secretive manner that the individual cannot understand. Kafka's world is one in which God is dead, and the individual is "on trial," as the name of his most famous novel suggests. It is a world devoid of meaning or purpose other than to clear one's name of the nebulous sense of guilt that pervades the atmosphere. The adjective "Kafkaesque" has come into common use to denote mundane yet absurd and surreal circumstances of the kind commonly found in Kafka's work.