This is one title in a series of short, illustrated biographies suitable for students and the general reader. They tell the stories of those who have shaped our present and our past, from Beethoven to Dietrich, and from Einstein to Churchill.Franz Kafka died almost unacknowledged but he is now recognised as one of the greatest authors of the 20th century and the creator of some of modern literature’s most unsettling and memorable images. As this biography shows, this world was very much Kafka’s own: his personal life was as complicated and troubled as anything in his books. Klaus Wagenbach offers an acute portrait of a mind torn between the attractions of the world, including a series of intense relationships with women, and his desire for solitude. The result was writing, which, according to Albert Camus, takes us ‘to the limits of human thought.’