Franz Kafka asked his closest friend, Max Brod, to burn all his unpublished manuscripts after his death. Brod refused. It is the most consequential act of literary disobedience in history, because without it, we would have neither The Trial nor The Castle -- the two unfinished novels that, along with The Metamorphosis, made "Kafkaesque" an adjective in every major language.

Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, the eldest child of Hermann Kafka, a self-made businessman of enormous physical presence and domineering temperament. The relationship between father and son is the black hole at the center of Kafka's universe. In 1919, Kafka wrote a hundred-page letter to his father -- never delivered, never answered -- that is one of the most devastating documents of filial anguish ever composed. "Dearest Father," it begins, and then proceeds to anatomize, with forensic precision and trembling courtesy, every instance of humiliation, contempt, and emotional violence that had shaped Kafka's inner life. The letter explains everything about his fiction: the faceless authorities, the incomprehensible accusations, the guilty men who do not know their crime.

He studied law, worked as an insurance clerk at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, and wrote at night, in his small room, in a state of focused desperation. The Metamorphosis, written in a few weeks in late 1912, begins with one of the most famous sentences in literature: "One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." The story that follows is not a fantasy but a literalization of how it feels to be rejected by your family for failing to meet their expectations -- the vermin is not a metaphor but a condition.

The Trial, begun in 1914 and abandoned, describes a man arrested and prosecuted by an inscrutable authority for a crime never specified. The Castle, also unfinished, follows a land surveyor summoned to a village governed by an unreachable bureaucracy. Both novels anticipate, with uncanny precision, the totalitarian machinery of the twentieth century -- but they also describe something more intimate and universal: the experience of living in a world whose rules you are expected to follow but can never quite learn.

Kafka was tall, handsome, vegetarian, an excellent swimmer, and ferociously funny -- a fact obscured by the grim seriousness with which his work is often taught. He read his stories aloud to friends and they all laughed. The humor is real: The Metamorphosis is, among other things, a very dark comedy about a family's irritation at having a giant bug in the spare room.

He died of tuberculosis in 1924, at forty, in a sanatorium outside Vienna, unable to eat or drink, correcting the proofs of "A Hunger Artist" -- a story about a man who starves himself as a form of performance -- in the final days of his life. The coincidence is so perfectly Kafkaesque that it seems like one of his own inventions.