Franz Kafkathe poet of alienation

He worked for the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, writing reports on lathe accidents and quarry safety. He was promoted repeatedly. Colleagues found him funny. He wrote his fiction at night, after the office, in a flat where he could hear every conversation through the walls, and complained about the noise in letters longer than some of his stories.

He published almost nothing while alive, a few thin volumes, mostly unread. The novels sat unfinished in drawers. Dying of tuberculosis at 40, he left instructions with his friend Max Brod to burn every manuscript, unread.

Brod read them, and published them. He had told Kafka to his face years earlier that he would never do it, which means Kafka chose an executor he knew would refuse. Make of that what you like, the whole shelf exists because someone ignored a dead man's wishes.

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

Franz Kafka