America

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. 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 published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920.
The great novels were not published until after his death from tuberculosis: America, The Trial and The Castle. Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet who writes in English. He has translated the works of Bertolt Brecht, Franza Kafka, Hans Fallada, and Joseph Roth, and teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.