Research Paper on:
Life and Art of Franz Kafka

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
Prague on July 3, 1883 to Hermann and Julie Kafka (Anonymous, 2002). His father was a self-made, middle-class Jewish merchant, who tried to raise his children so that they  would be assimilated into the mainstream culture of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The official language of the empire was German, so Kafkas father had his son and three daughters attend a  German grammar school, and later a German Gymnasium (the term for German secondary school). Kafka obtained a law degree at the German language University, and initially found a job  with a private insurance company before going to work for the Workers Accident Insurance, which provided him with a steady income and a "regular" office schedule (Anonymous, 2002). This allowed  Kafka to dedicate his evening hours to writing. Beginnings as a writer Kafkas first published work came in 1907 (Anonymous, 2002). While Kafka continued to publish throughout the next  seventeen years, the bulk of his work was published after his death, edited by his friend Max Brod (Anonymous, 2002). Kafkas relationship to his father holds a pivotal position in  both his life and his writing (Anonymous, 2002). Franz was "thin" and "intellectual," which provided a sharp contrast to his "robust, loud, and corporal" father (Anonymous, 2002). Wasserman (2002)  feels that it was his fathers rough treatment of his employees that first propelled young Kafka toward the cause of workers rights and socialism, and provided thematic material for his  writing. Reitter (2000) connects Kafkas "pervasive, probing melancholy" with the Prague circle of writers who were his contemporaries (p. 28). These writers took a worldview that left them  "precariously suspended between territories, with no firm ground beneath their feet" and that Kafka simply took this search even further away from the bourgeois sanctimony that that they all rejected