Writer Franz Kafka is born in Prague, Bohemia (now Czech Republic) in 1883. The lawyer-turned-author’s stories featured characters in often darkly surreal circumstances, most famously in The Metamorphosis. Though rarely published in his lifetime, his work has become widely influential, from Jean Paul Sartre to Ray Bradbury, and in film and TV from Brazil to The Prisoner and The Twilight Zone. He died in 1924.
This Day in Halloween: Lawyer-turned-influential-surrealist-writer Franz Kafka is born in Prague, Bohemia (now Czech Republic) in 1883. / Illustration by Deanna Lim