Franz Kafka was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague on July 3, 1883. two of his brothers died in infancy, which made him the eldest son, a role he would always be very conscious of.

kafka's father, a merchant and a tyrannical man, was the most important figure in both kafka's work and his life. in his brief an den vater (1919, letter to the father), an attempt to an autobiography, kafka accused his father of being the main cause for him never being able to cut loose from his parental ties and establish himself in the world. this letter, however, never reached the addressee. but kafka's despair was not only due to his father - the root of it lied in his sense of isolation from true communion with other human beings; his friends, the women he loved, the job he hated - and with god, to who he referred as the 'true indistructable being'.

The conflict with the father is reflected directly in Kafka's story Das Urteil (1916; The Judgment). It is projected on a grander scale in Kafka's novels, which portray in lucid, deceptively simple prose a man's desperate struggle with an overwhelming power, one that may persecute its victim (as in The Trial) or one that may be sought after and begged in vain for approval (as in The Castle).

after elementary school, kafka did well in the Altstaedter Staatsgymnasium, an exacting high school for the academic elite. He was respected and liked by his teachers. Inwardly, however, he rebelled against the authoritarian institution and the dehumanized humanistic curriculum, with its emphasis on rote learning and classical languages. Kafka's opposition to established society became apparent when, as an adolescent, he declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist. Throughout his adult life he expressed qualified sympathies for the socialists; attended meetings of the Czech Anarchists (before World War I); and, in his later years, showed marked interest and sympathy for a socialized Zionism. Even then he was essentially passive and politically unengaged.

in 1902 he met Max Brod; this minor literary artist became the most intimate and solicitous of Kafka's friends, and eventually he emerged as the promoter, saviour, and interpreter of Kafka's writings and as his most influential biographer.

In 1908 he found a job in Prague in the seminationalized Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. There he remained until 1917, when tuberculosis forced him to take intermittent sick leaves and, finally, to retire (with a pension) in 1922, about two years before he died. In this period he wrote die verwandlung (1915, the metamorphosis). In his job he was considered tireless and ambitious; he soon became the right hand of his boss, and he was esteemed and liked by all who worked with him.

The conflicting inclinations of his complex and ambivalent personality found expression in his sexual relationships. Inhibition painfully disturbed his relations with Felice Bauer, to whom he was twice engaged before their final rupture in 1917. Later his love for Milena Jesenská Pollak was also thwarted. His health was poor and office work exhausted him. In 1917 he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, and from then onward he spent frequent periods in sanatoriums.

In 1923 Kafka went to Berlin to escape from his paternal family and devote himself to writing. In Berlin he found new hope in the companionship of a young Jewish socialist, Dora Dymant, but his stay was cut short by a decisive deterioration of his health during the winter of 1924. After a brief final stay in Prague, where Dora Dymant joined him, he died in a clinic near Vienna.