Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a Czech-German novelist who worked as an insurance clerk in Prague and wrote in secret, publishing little during his lifetime. He instructed his friend Max Brod to burn all his manuscripts on his death; Brod ignored him and published everything. The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle established Kafka as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, and gave the language a new adjective — "Kafkaesque" — for the experience of being trapped in an incomprehensible bureaucratic nightmare.