Franz Kafka was one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the early 20th century; a novelist and writer of short stories whose works, only after his death, came to be regarded as major achievements of 20th-century literature. Kafka was a Jewish Austrian-Czech novelist and writer from Prague who wrote in German. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature.

His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, and typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926). The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.

Born into a middle-class German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, Kafka trained as a lawyer. After completing his legal education, he was employed full-time in various legal and insurance jobs, which forced him to relegate writing to his spare time. Few of his works were published during his lifetime; however, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained relationship.

Kafka was a prolific writer, but he burned an estimated 90 percent of his total work due to persistent struggles with self-doubt. Much of the remaining 10 percent is lost or otherwise unpublished. In his will, Kafka instructed his close friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works, but Brod ignored these instructions and had much of his work published. Kafka's writings became famous in German-speaking countries after World War II, influencing German literature, and its influence spread elsewhere in the world in the 1960s.