Kafka accepts his first job as a clerk at Assicurazioni Generali, an Italian insurance company in Prague. The job is boring, and his night shift makes it hard to keep up with his writing. Kafka hates it. Kafka resigns from the insurance agency. Two weeks later, he finds work at a government job handling workers' compensation insurance. His first published short stories appear in Hyperion magazine. Kafka begins a period of exploration into his Jewish identity, as well as his literary vocation.
He attends lectures and theater performances that focus on Jewish issues and writes intensely. He begins his novel Amerika. Kafka meets a woman named Felice Bauer at the home of his friend Max Brod. The two develop a romantic relationship conducted mostly by mail. Kafka writes her more than letters during their five-year relationship.
Kafka's first book, an anthology of his short stories entitled Contemplation , is published. Kafka writes the novel The Trial , about a man persecuted for an unknown crime. It is not published until after his death. Kafka proposes to Felice Bauer, but breaks off the engagement just three months later. While Kafka strove to earn a living, he also poured himself into his writing work.
An old friend named Max Brod would prove crucial in supporting Kafka's literary work both during his life and long after it. Kafka's celebrity as a writer only came after his death. During his lifetime, he published just a sliver of his overall work. His most popular and best-selling short story, "The Metamorphosis," was completed in and published in The story was written from Kafka's third-floor room, which offered a direct view of the Vltava River and its toll bridge.
Kafka followed up "The Metamorphosis" with Mediation , a collection of short stories, in , and "Before the Law," a parable within his novel The Trial , written between and Even with his worsening health, Kafka continued to write. In he completed "The Judgment," which spoke directly about the relationship he shared with his father. In , an ill but still working Kafka finished A Hunger Artist , which features four stories that demonstrate the concise and lucid style that marked his writing at the end of his life.
But Kafka, still living with the demons that plagued with him self-doubt, was reluctant to unleash his work on the world. He requested that Brod, who doubled as his literary executor, destroy any unpublished manuscripts. Fortunately, Brod did not adhere to his friend's wishes and in published The Trial , a dark, paranoid tale that proved to be the author's most successful novel. The story centers on the life of Joseph K. The following year, Brod released The Castle , which again railed against a faceless and dominating bureaucracy.
In the novel, the protagonist, whom the reader knows only as K. In , the novel Amerika was published. The story hinges on a boy, Karl Rossmann, who is sent by his family to America, where his innocence and simplicity are exploited everywhere he travels. Amerika struck at the same father issues that were prevalent in so much of Kafka's other work. But the story also spoke to Kafka's love of travel books and memoirs he adored The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and his longing to see the world.
Franz Kafka began a job at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute and stayed at that job until He became ill with tuberculosis and was forced to take sick leave. Because of his tuberculosis Franz retired in Franz Kafka was engaged twice to the same woman, Felice Bauer. They never married. Even before becoming ill with tuberculosis Franz had suffered from health issues including depression, migraines, insomnia and anxiety.
Although Franz Kafka wrote a lot during his lifetime, only a small amount of his writing was published while he was alive. Kafka had to dedicate much of his free time to the business. During that period, he also found interest and entertainment in the performances of Yiddish theatre, despite the misgivings of even close friends such as Max Brod, who usually supported him in everything else. Those performances also served as a starting point for his growing relationship with Judaism.
In , at the home of his lifelong friend Max Brod, Kafka met Felice Bauer, who lived in Berlin and worked as a representative for a dictaphone company. Over the next five years they corresponded a great deal, met occasionally, and twice were engaged to be married. Their relationship finally ended in In , Kafka began to suffer from tuberculosis, which would require frequent convalescence during which he was supported by his family, most notably his sister Ottla.
Despite his fear of being perceived as both physically and mentally repulsive, he impressed others with his boyish, neat, and austere good looks, a quiet and cool demeanor, obvious intelligence and dry sense of humor.
In , he briefly moved to Berlin in the hope of distancing himself from his family's influence to concentrate on his writing. In Berlin, he lived with Dora Diamant, a year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family, who was independent enough to have escaped her past in the ghetto.
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