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Franz Kafka, "A Hunger Artist"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(1883–1924)

Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague, Franz Kafka earned a doctorate in law from the German University in that city and held an inconspicuous position in the civil service for many years.Emotionally and physically ill for the last seven or eight years of his short life, he died of tuberculosis in Vienna, never having married (though he was twice engaged to the same woman and lived with an actress in Berlin for some time before he died) and not having published his three major novels, The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927).Indeed, he ordered his friend Max Brod to destroy them and other works he had left in manuscript.Fortunately, Brod did not; and not long after Kafka's death, his sometimesdreamlike, sometimes-nightmarish work was known and admired all over the world.His stories in English translation are collected in The Great Wall of China (1933), The Penal Colony (1948), and The Complete Stories (1976).

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