This is the acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of
Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over
four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many
never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived
and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented
years of his life. This period, which would prove crucial to Kafka's
writing and set the course for the rest of his life, saw him working
with astonishing intensity on his most seminal writings--The Trial,
The Metamorphosis, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and The
Judgment. These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with Zionism;
of his tumultuous engagement to Felice Bauer; and of the outbreak of
World War I.
Kafka: The Decisive Years is at once an extraordinary portrait of the
writer and a startlingly original contribution to the art of literary
biography.