Amerika: Roman

by Franz Kafka

Overview

Franz Kafka: Gesammelte Werke. Herausgegeben von Max Brod, Band 1-9, Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1950 ff. Entstanden zwischen 1911 u. 1914: München 1927. Der Titel stammt von Max Brod. Kafka selbst nannte das Fragment »Der Verschollene«. Das erste Kapitel, »Der Heizer«, erschien als selbständige Erzählung: Leipzig (Kurt Wolff) 1913.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783869512280
Publisher:	Editura Gesellschaft für Verlagsdienstleistungen
Publication date:	01/01/2010
Sold by:	Libreka GmbH
Format:	eBook
Pages:	323
File size:	649 KB
Language:	German

About the Author

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 to a well-to-do middle-class Jewish family. His father, the self-made proprietor of a wholesale haberdashery business, was a domineering man whose approbation Franz continually struggled to win. The younger Kafka's feelings of inadequacy and guilt form the background of much of his work and are made explicit in his "Letter to His Father" (excerpted in this volume), which was written in 1919 but never sent.

Kafka was educated in the German language schools of Prague and at the city's German University, where in 1908 he took a law degree. Literature, however, remained his sole passion. At this time he became part of a literary circle that included Franz Werfel, Martin Buber, and Kafka's close friend Max Brod. Encouraged by Brod, Kafka published the prose collection Observations in 1913. Two years later his story "The Stoker" won the Fontaine prize. In 1916 he began work on The Trial and between this time and 1923 produced three incomplete novels as well as numerous sketches and stories. In his lifetime some of his short works did appear: The Judgment (1916), The Metamorphosis (1916), The Penal Colony (1919), and The Country Doctor (1919).

Before his death of tuberculosis in 1924, Kafka had charged Max Brod with the execution of his estate, ordering Brod to burn the manuscripts. With the somewhat circular justification that Kafka must have known his friend could not obey such an order, Brod decided to publish Kafka's writings. To this act of "betrayal" the world owes the preservation of some of the most unforgettable and influential literary works of our century.

Biography courtesy of BN.com

Date of Birth:

July 3, 1883

Date of Death:

June 3, 1924

Place of Birth:

Prague, Austria-Hungary

Place of Death:

Vienna, Austria

Education:

German elementary and secondary schools. Graduated from German Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague.