Austrian · 1883–1924
Franz Kafka worked as an insurance lawyer in Prague while writing stories that became adjectives. His novels and tales—"The Trial," "The Metamorphosis," "The Castle"—depict individuals crushed by incomprehensible bureaucratic systems, their guilt assumed and their appeals perpetually deferred. Kafka published little during his lifetime and asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts; Brod's disobedience preserved works that would define twentieth-century anxiety. "Kafkaesque" now describes any system that grinds individuals down with procedural indifference.