Name: Franz Kafka
Birth Date: 1883
Death Date: 1924
Gender: Male
Occupations: novelist, short-story writer
Literary movement: modernism, existentialism, Surrealism, precursor to magical realism
Influences: Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Nietzsche
Influenced: Albert Camus, Federico Fellini, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Salman Rushdie
Franz Kafka earned a law degree and worked for an insurance firm while writing mostly short fiction on the side. He began publishing in 1907, but what are now considered his major works appeared posthumously. His short stories and essays, such as The Metamorphosis (1915), appeared in his lifetime, but his three unfinished novels were published posthumously (against his wishes) by his friend Max Brod: Der Prozess (1925, The Trial), Das Schloss (1926, The Castle), and Amerika (1927). Kafka’s work, with its themes of alienation from society and a general anxiety over just being alive, had a strong influence on authors and intellectuals. Kafka’s style is so consistent and unique that it has become its own brand – Kafkaesque.
