Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian author, born in Prague in 1883, who is widely recognized for his influential body of work in European literature. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including "The Metamorphosis," "The Judgment," and "The Stoker." He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. Kafka's stories, such as "The Metamorphosis" (1916), and posthumously published novels, including The Trial (1925), portray troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal world.
Kafka was born into a Jewish middle-class family that spoke German. He also spoke fluent Czech and acquired some knowledge of the French language and culture from Flaubert, one of his favorite authors. Kafka first studied chemistry at the Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague but later switched to law, which offered a range of career possibilities and required a longer course of study that gave him time to take classes in German studies and art history. While at the university, he joined a student club, named Lese- und Redehalle der Deutschen Studenten, which organized literary events, readings, and other activities. It was here that he met Max Brod, a close friend of his throughout his life, together with the journalist Felix Weltsch, who also studied law.
Despite Kafka's first language being German, he wrote all his published works in German except several letters in Czech to Milena Jesenská. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes, and the works were quickly began to attract attention and high critical regard. However, Brod encountered significant difficulty in compiling Kafka's notebooks into any chronological order as Kafka started writing in the middle of notebooks, from the last towards the first, et cetera. Kafka's peculiar style literario has been commonly associated with the philosophical artistry of existentialism, and he has influenced the movement significantly. Scholars of Kafka continue to debate on how to interpret the author, with some suggesting possible influences of antiburocratic ideologies, mística religiosidad, or reivindicación of his ethnocultural minority, while others focus on the psychological content of his works. Kafka's personal relationships, particularly with his father, his fiancée Felice Bauer, and his sister, also had a significant impact on his writing. The term "kafkiano" is used in Spanish to describe surreal situations like those found in his books and has equivalents in other languages. Only a few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime, and the majority, including incomplete works, were published by his friend Max Brod, who ignored the author's wishes that the manuscripts be destroyed.