Franz Kafka
1883 – 1924 Czech writer
The writer whose nightmarish visions named a whole modern condition.
- Religion
- A secular Jew with a searching, ambivalent interest in Judaism and questions of guilt, law, and grace.
- Affiliations
- None. He worked as an insurance official and wrote at night.
Kafka wrote The Trial, The Metamorphosis, and The Castle, tales of ordinary people trapped in absurd, faceless systems. His work gave us the word Kafkaesque for such helpless, bureaucratic dread. He asked that his manuscripts be burned, but his friend published them instead.