Kafka : A Biography (Hardcover)

This engrossing biography of highly influential Czech novelist and short-story writer Franz Kafka emphasizes the cultural and historical contexts of his fiction and focuses for the first time on his complex relationship with his father.

The definitive biography of the representative writer of our age

Although Franz Kafka (1883-1924) completed only a small number of works in his lifetime, perhaps no other author has had a greater influence on twentieth-century consciousness. This engrossing biography of the Czech novelist and short-story writer emphasizes the cultural and historical contexts of his fiction and focuses for the first time on his complex relationship with his father.

Nicholas Murray paints a picture of Kafka's German-speaking Jewish family and the Prague mercantile bourgeoisie to which they belonged. He describes Kafka's demanding professional career, his ill health, and the constantly receding prospects of a marriage he craved. He analyzes Kafka's poor relationship with his father, Hermann, which found its most eloquent expression in Kafka's story "The Judgement," about a father who condemns his son to death by drowning. And he asserts that the unsettling flavor of Kafka's books--stories suffused with guilt and frustration--derives from his sense of living in a mysteriously antagonistic world, of being a criminal without having knowingly committed a crime.

Compelling and empathetic, this book sheds new light on a man of unique genius and on his enigmatic works.