Other literary sources claimed as influences include Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Arthur Holitscher’s popular reports from American were first serialised in newspapers and then published with illustrative photographs as Amerika: Heute und morgan, of which Kafka owned a copy. Kafka was an avid reader of travel literature. It must have been strange for the writer to have his namesake escaping the confines of Prague - which Kafka didn’t himself achieve until near the end of his life - for the promised freedom of the New World. Of more significance in relation to this novel, which is set in New York, were his cousins Otto, who established himself there as a successful businessman, and Franz (known as Frank), his younger brother who joined him in 1909 at the age of sixteen. His maternal uncles Joseph and Alfred Loewy, and cousins Emil and Victor Kafka all spent time in North America. Family members had emigrated to the States and wrote home or occasionally visited Prague. Kafka based his fictional America on a number of personal and published sources. He worked on it intermittently between 19, after which he put the manuscript aside and it remained ‘unfinished’ at his death. Conversations with Kafka, Gustav Janouch.įranz Kafka (1883-1924) never visited America, although it provided the setting for his first novel, Der Verschollene ( The Man Who Disappeared), which was published under the title of Amerika in 1927. That is perfectly understandable, because Europe is becoming more and more a land of impossible limitations’.

Kafka said, ‘They are merely dreams of a marvellous America, of a wonderland of unlimited possibilities. I took him photographs of constructivist pictures.

Kafka 1927