Franz Kafka

Kafka spent his days as a claims adjuster at a workers' accident insurance institute, drafting careful reports on industrial injuries, and wrote at night in the cramped apartment he shared with his family, chronically exhausted and increasingly ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him at forty. He was engaged three times, twice to the same woman, Felice Bauer, and broke off each engagement, unable to reconcile marriage with the writing he distrusted and needed in equal measure.

During his lifetime he published only a handful of slim volumes, including The Metamorphosis; The Trial and The Castle existed only as unfinished manuscripts he explicitly asked his friend Max Brod to burn. Brod refused, editing and publishing them after Kafka's 1924 death, and a world that had just endured a war of senseless bureaucratic slaughter recognized itself immediately in the trials without charges and the castles without entry.