Franz Kafka

He is also celebrated for his brief fables and aphorisms, which frequently incorporated comedic elements alongside the darker themes of his longer works. His work has widely influenced artists, philosophers, composers, filmmakers, literary historians, religious scholars, and cultural theorists, and his writings have been seen as prophetic or premonitory of a totalitarian future. Kafka was born into a middle-class German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (later the capital of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic). He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time in various legal and insurance jobs. His professional obligations led to internal conflict as he felt that his true vocation was writing. Only a minority of his works were published during his life; the story collections Contemplation (1912) and A Country Doctor (1919), and individual stories, such as his novella The Metamorphosis, were published in literary magazines, but they received little attention. He wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died relatively unknown in 1924 of tuberculosis, aged 40. His literary executor and friend Max Brod ignored Kafka's wishes to destroy his remaining works, publishing them to eventual acclaim.