Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was the Czech-born German-language writer who, in a handful of novels and stories, created the adjective that bears his name: Kafkaesque — the condition of being trapped in an opaque, inexplicable system that demands compliance without explaining its terms. Born in Prague in 1883 to a German-speaking Jewish family, he worked as a lawyer for an insurance company by day and wrote at night, publishing very little in his lifetime and instructing his friend Max Brod to burn the manuscripts after his death. Brod did not comply, and The Trial, The Castle, and The Metamorphosis reached the world. His aphorisms have the compression of a man who had no time to waste: so long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being. He died of tuberculosis in 1924 at forty, still revising The Castle.