Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, the son of a Jewish merchant. Having studied at the university there, he worked for an insurance company until retiring in 1922 because of tuberculosis; two years later he died. Short and outwardly uneventful as his life was - he never married, and essentially stayed in his native city throughout his life - he did publish a few short stories. He had instructed his friend Max Brod to burn those works left unpublished when he died. Brod chose to ignore the request: three novels, The Trial, The Castle, and America subsequently appeared, in 1925, 1926 and 1927 respectively. —Naxos Audiobooks