Franz Kafka was born in 1883 to a middle-class Jewish family in Prague. His father Hermann Kafka owned a fancy goods business that expanded to include a department store in Prague's Old Town Square and an asbestos factory. His mother Julie Kafka (nee Löwy）came from a family of textile merchants. He had three sisters: Gabrielle (Elli), Valerie (Valli), and Ottla (Ottlie) as well as 2 younger brothers, Hermann and Georg, who died soon after birth. Kafka attended Gymnasium and later Charles University in Prague, where he met his lifelong friend Max Brod. The Kafka family spoke both German and Czech. Kafka went on to serve as a lawyer at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He would work here until 1918 when his chronic tuberculosis forced him to retire early.
In 1912 Kafka met Felice Bauer, one of Max Brod's cousins, and began a 5-year long correspondence with her that resulted in 2 engagements without marriage. He would be briefly engaged a third time to Julie Wohryzek around 1920, and later that same year he began writing letters to his translator Milena Jesenská that developed into a similarly intense correspondence. Kafka broke off the relationship due to his worsening health and later met Dora Diamant in 1923 at a resort. They moved to Berlin together and Diamant remained with Kafka until his death from tuberculosis in a sanatorium outside of Vienna in 1924. He was 41 years old.
Several of Kafka's works, such as The Metamorphosis and The Judgement, were published during his lifetime, but he never achieved widespread fame. Kafka left his diaries, drawings, letters, and countless literary manuscripts both complete and fragmentary to his friend Brod, who was instructed to burn everything unread. However, Brod would go on to edit and publish everything he could find from both his personal holdings and Kafka's friends, family, and lovers, and spent much of the rest of his life championing Kafka as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
Recommended biographies
- The one that started it all: Kafka by Max Brod
- The definitive biography: Reiner Stach's 3-volume series trans. Shelley Frisch (The Early Years, The Decisive Years, Years of Insight)
- Kafka by Nicholas Murray
- Kafka by Klaus Wagenbach (trans. Ewald Osers)
- Kafka by David Zane Mairowitz (illustrated by Robert Crumb)
- Als Kafka mir entgegenkam: Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka edited by Hans-Gerd Koch
- The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka by Ernst Pawel
Specialized biographical resources
- Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient by Sander L. Gilman
- Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt by Saul Friedländer
- Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch
- Is That Kafka? 99 Finds by Reiner Stach