An icon of twentieth-century literature, Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, into a middle-class, German family in Prague. Never famous in his own lifetime, most of Kafka’s works were published and translated only during the 1920s and 1930s, and almost instantly, they became cult texts of modern literature. The Judgment, The Metamorphosis, and Amerika were all written in 1912 while The Trial, Kafka’s most famous novel, was written in 1914. Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924.