Franz Kafka  (1883-1924) LINKS Das Schloss der Verwandlungen http://www.rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/kafka.schloss.html Known as "The Castle," this interesting Web site is a great starting place for research on Kafka. It includes a brief biography and timeline of Kafka's life; a bibliography of works by and about the author; photographs; and links to other helpful sites. Kafka's Biography http://httpsrv.ocs.drexel.edu/faculty/horndj/autobio.html This site, maintained by a professor at Drexel University, emphasizes Kafka's relationship to the law. It offers links to other useful Kafka Web sites, as well as texts of Kafka's "Parables and Meditations," "A Hunger Artist," and "A Common Occurrence." Papers, Reports, Trivia, and Curiosa around Franz Kafka http://info.pitt.edu/~kafka/stuff.html This Web site, developed by graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh, includes works inspired by Kafka's writings, miscellaneous essays, and scholarly works. It also offers a bibliography of Kafka's works, links to Kafka on the Web, and a comments page for people who would like to contribute to the Web site. BIOGRAPHY Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who said that a book should serve as "an axe to break up the frozen sea within us," led a simple and sad life. He was born into a Jewish family in Prague, and from youth onward he feared his authoritarian father so much that he stuttered in his presence, although he spoke easily with others. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the state Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He never married and lived for the most part with his parents, writing fiction at night (he was an insomniac) and publishing only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; The Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. Only a few of his friends knew that Kafka was also at work on the great novels that were published after his death from tuberculosis: Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle. Kafka's despair with his writing, his job, his father, and his life was all encompassing. Like Gustave Flaubert — whom he admired — he used his fiction as a "rock" to which he clung in order not to be drowned in the waves of the world around him. With typical irony, however, he saw the effort as futile: "By scribbling I run ahead of myself in order to catch myself up at the finishing post. I cannot run away from myself."

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