Franz Kafka was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague (then in Austria-Hungary) on July 3, 1883. His father, a merchant, was a domineering figure whose influence pervaded his son's work and stifled his life. Letter to His Father expresses his feelings of inferiority and paternal rejection. Nevertheless, Kafka lived with his family most of his life, never marrying although engaged twice. His uneasy relationship with Felice Bauer, a young German woman whom he courted between 1912 …
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…left to die alone. Another story, "In the Penal Colony", is a chilling fantasy of imprisonment and torture. Contrary to Kafka's wish that his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed after his death, his friend and biographer, the Austrian writer Max Brod, published them and thus established Kafka's reputation. Among these works are the three novels for which Kafka is best known (all first translated by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir) The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.