Franz Kafka

Born in Prague on July 3, 1883, he grew up in a German-speaking Jewish family and went on to study law at the University of Prague. After earning his doctorate, he worked in insurance, a demanding job that left him writing mostly at night.

During his lifetime, only a small part of his fiction appeared in print. Yet the works most closely associated with him today—including The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle—helped make him one of the central writers of 20th-century literature, known for stories where ordinary life slips into strangeness, pressure, and dread.

He died on June 3, 1924, near Vienna. Much of his reputation was built after his death, when his friend Max Brod preserved and published manuscripts that Kafka had asked to be destroyed, allowing later generations to discover the full power of his voice.