FRANZ KAFKA (1883-1924) was born in Prague to a middle-class Jewish family and spent most of his working life as an insurance clerk-a fact that shaped his fiction as profoundly as any literary influence. Writing largely at night, he produced a body of work marked by bureaucratic dread, psychological intensity, and a humor so dry it can be mistaken for despair. He published little during his lifetime and instructed his closest friend, Max Brod, to burn his manuscripts upon his death. Brod did not. The novels and stories he saved-The Trial, The Castle, In the Penal Colony, and The Metamorphosis among them-went on to define a mode of modern anxiety so distinct that the word Kafkaesque entered the language permanently. Kafka died of tuberculosis at forty, leaving behind work that would outlast nearly everything written in his century.