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Welcome to my Franz Kafka site |
Biography |
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) |
| Franz Kafka
was born of Jewish parents in Prague in 1883. The family spoke both
Czech and German; Franz was sent to German-language schools and to the
German University, from which he received his doctorate in law in 1906.
He then worked for most of his life as a respected official of a state
insurance company (first under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then under
the new Republic of Czechoslovakia). Literature, of which he said that
'he consisted', had to be pursued on the side. His emotional life was
dominated by his relationships with his father, a man of overbearing
character, and with a series of women: Felice Bauer from Berlin, to whom
he was twice engaged; his Czech translator, Milena Jesenska-Pollak, to
whom he became attached in 1920; and Dora Diamant, a young Jewish woman
from Poland in whom he found a devoted companion during the last year of
his life. Meanwhile, his writing had taken a new turn in 1917 with the
outbreak of the tubercular illness from which he was to die in 1924.
Only a small number of Kafka's stories were published during his
lifetime, and these are published in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics
as 'The Transformation and Other Stories'. He asked his friend, Max
Brod, to see that all the writings he left should be destroyed. Brod
felt unable to comply and undertook their publication instead, beginning
with the three unfinished novels, 'The Trial' (1925), 'The Castle'
(1926) and 'Amerika' (1927). Other shorter works appeared posthumously
in a more sporadic fashion, and a representative selection of them is
collected in 'The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works'. Other info coming soon...
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