Franz Kafka

Easton Press Franz Kafka books

The Trial - Library of Famous Editions - 1992
The Trial - Great Books of The Twentieth Century - 1995

Franklin Library Franz Kafka books

The Trial - 100 Greatest Books of All Time - 1977
The Trial - Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century - 1978
The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1980

The Trial - Oxford Library of The World's Greatest Books - 1983

Writer Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was an Austrian novelist, short story writer, and essayist, who was born in Prague, and educated at the German University of Prague. For most of Franz Kafka's life he was an Austrian civil service worker, and did his writing in the time left after his duties. Franz Kafka is considered one of the most significant European writers of the first quarter of the 20th century. The theme of Kafka's work is the frustration, bewilderment, and loneliness of modern man. Franz Kafka's heroes, oppressed by an inherent sense of guilt, find themselves in constant conflict with the incomprehensible laws of a vindictive God. Their efforts to understand the authorities by whom they are pursued and the laws by which they are judged are doomed to failure; yet Kafka also believed that something indestructible exists in man, and that he must live and fight against his incomprehensible fate. Franz Kafka stories are marked by an irrational and dreamlike quality. In philosophy his doctrine is akin to that of the Danish philosopher Soren Aabye Kierkegaard and to that of the 20th century French philosophical and literary movement existentialism. In literary technique Franz Kafka's books have the qualities of both expressionism and surrealism. The only books of Franz Kafka published during his lifetime are Contemplation (1913), a collection of his miscellaneous prose; several short stories: The Judgment (1913), The Metamorphosis (1916), and the volume of short stories A Country Doctor (1919); and a volume of miscellaneous prose, A Hunger Artist (1923).

Franz Kafka is best known for three unfinished novels edited by his friend the German writer Max Brod, and posthumously published in spite of Franz Kafka's order that the manuscripts were to be destroyed after his death. These books are The Trial (1924), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927). Max Brod also edited Franz Kafka's Collected Writings (1937).