Facts about Franz Kafka

1. 12

   Born in Prague in 1883, Kafka wrote primarily in German despite living in a predominantly Czech-speaking city.

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2. 11

   Kafka's 1913 novel Amerika, his first completed book-length work, follows a young immigrant named Karl Rossman through a fantastical depiction of the United States that Kafka himself never visited.

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3. 10

   Kafka's 1924 short story A Hunger Artist was his final published work, appearing in a Berlin journal just months before his death from tuberculosis.

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4. 09

   Kafka's 1920 short story A Little Woman portrays a woman who obsessively follows and stalks the protagonist through Prague streets for years, reflecting his own anxious observations of the city's inhabitants.

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5. 08

   Kafka's Prague apartment on the Old Town Square housed his writing desk in a small room where he composed most of his major works between 1907 and 1923.

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6. 07

   Kafka's 1912 novella The Metamorphosis was completed in just two weeks during an intense creative period in September, transforming his protagonist Gregor Samsa into a giant insect.

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7. 06

   Kafka's 1919 short story A Hunger Artist depicts a fasting performer, drawing from the real 1880s phenomenon of European exhibition fasters who publicly starved themselves for weeks as entertainment.

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8. 05

   Throughout his life, Kafka suffered from chronic tuberculosis, which killed him on June 3, 1924, at age forty in a sanatorium near Vienna.

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9. 04

   Kafka's 1915 short story The Metamorphosis was first published in the German literary journal Die Weißen Blätter edited by René Schickele.

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10. 03

    Kafka's unfinished novel The Trial was published posthumously in 1925 by his friend Max Brod, who ignored Kafka's written request to destroy all his manuscripts.

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11. 02

    Kafka worked as an insurance claims adjuster for the Workers Accident Insurance Institute in Prague from 1908 until 1922, handling occupational injury cases.

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12. 01

    In 1923, Kafka dictated most of his novella The Hunger Artist to his lover Dora Diamant while ill in Berlin.

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