Kafka: A Biography
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Few writers have left as indelible and enigmatic a mark on world literature as Franz Kafka, and Ronald Hayman's Kafka: A Biography presents the most intimate and meticulously researched portrait of the man behind the myth. Drawing on letters, diaries, and first-hand accounts, Hayman chronicles the tortured inner life of the Prague-born writer — his suffocating relationship with his domineering father, his doomed romantic entanglements, his persistent illness, and his unrelenting compulsion to write — illuminating how these forces coalesced into some of the twentieth century's most haunting fiction. Hayman argues with quiet authority that Kafka's life and work are inseparable, that the labyrinths of dread and bureaucratic absurdity in The Trial and The Metamorphosis were not mere imagination but the direct transposition of a psyche under perpetual siege. Written with clarity, compassion, and scholarly rigour, this biography stands as a landmark work of literary life-writing, one that humanises a figure often reduced to an adjective. Readers who thought they understood Kafka will find themselves confronted with a far more complex, contradictory, and ultimately more fascinating human being.
Author: Ronald Hayman
Format: Hardback
Published: 1982, Oxford University Press
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Few writers have left as indelible and enigmatic a mark on world literature as Franz Kafka, and Ronald Hayman's Kafka: A Biography presents the most intimate and meticulously researched portrait of the man behind the myth. Drawing on letters, diaries, and first-hand accounts, Hayman chronicles the tortured inner life of the Prague-born writer — his suffocating relationship with his domineering father, his doomed romantic entanglements, his persistent illness, and his unrelenting compulsion to write — illuminating how these forces coalesced into some of the twentieth century's most haunting fiction. Hayman argues with quiet authority that Kafka's life and work are inseparable, that the labyrinths of dread and bureaucratic absurdity in The Trial and The Metamorphosis were not mere imagination but the direct transposition of a psyche under perpetual siege. Written with clarity, compassion, and scholarly rigour, this biography stands as a landmark work of literary life-writing, one that humanises a figure often reduced to an adjective. Readers who thought they understood Kafka will find themselves confronted with a far more complex, contradictory, and ultimately more fascinating human being.