Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Jew in Prague who worked as a lawyer for a workers’ insurance company, wrote at night, published a few stories, and asked his friend Max Brod to burn the rest. Brod refused, and The Trial, The Castle and the unfinished Amerika appeared after Kafka’s death from tuberculosis at forty. The Metamorphosis, in which a salesman wakes as an insect, is the one he published himself. The novels describe a world of arbitrary authority and endless corridors that the century then built. Kafkaesque is the only adjective on the lists that everyone uses.