Letter to the Father/Brief an den Vater

“This is the closest we have to Kafka’s memoirs, a story of mutual misunderstanding and alienation, charted in a series of evocatively sketched scenes…. For all its power of psychological analysis, the tone is rarely self-pitying but almost forensically detached…. The fact that Kafka nearly always gives his father the benefit of the doubt makes his accusations all the more devastating.” —The Times Literary Supplement “Kafka’s principal attempt at self-clarification is also one of the great confessions of literature.” —The New York Times Book Review

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna in 1924. After earning a law degree in 1906, he worked for most of his adult life at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. Only a small portion of Kafka’s writings were published during his lifetime. He left instructions for his friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his unpublished work after his death, instructions Brod famously ignored.