FRANZ KAFKA WAS BORN on July 3, 1883, into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He died at the age of forty-one with the dubious luck of one who died too soon to experience the Nazi terror. His favorite sister, Ottla; his second fiancée, Julie Wohryzek; and his lover, Milena Jesenská, a brilliant Czech writer, were all murdered in concentration camps. Kafka never married — though he fell in love easily, and was easily loved — despite having been engaged three times, twice to the same woman, Felice Bauer. Felice survived the terror and left an extraordinary, voluminous collection of Kafka’s letters, which are testimony to her courtship by one of the century’s strangest cavaliers, as eloquent in his charm as he was insistent on his unsuitability. Kafka broke off his second engagement to Felice after he had contracted tuberculosis, which in the end consumed his larynx and caused him excruciating pain, so that he could barely speak and literally starved to death.

Kafka pursued many different paths to fulfill a life lived under intense self-scrutiny and, especially in the later years, considerable moral precision. His many friends testify to his unfailing courtesy, good humor, readiness to help — and exquisite phrasing. In response to his bullying father’s complaint that his behavior was “crazy, meshuggah, not normal,” Kafka replied, “Not being normal is not the worst thing. What’s normal, for example, is world war.”

Kafka’s moral qualities only added to the attractiveness of his person: he was a handsome man, some six feet tall, athletic, and at 135 pounds able to wear beautiful clothes to advantage. He was much valued for these qualities, as well as for his lawyerly brilliance, especially at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague, where he rose to a high official position, becoming Senior Legal Secretary shortly before his death; and yet all the substantial good he did there could never amount to his justification. He read voraciously in seven languages, thought intensely, cared passionately for the welfare of Jewish refugees, and even pursued gardening seriously, but the path he followed — and to judge from his posthumous fame, found — was, with several interruptions, the way of writing.