re: What am I missing on Franz Kafka?

Kafka is a fine writer, but nowhere near the titan of literature his legend has been made out to be.

In the 20th century serious literary circles started to move away from merit-based reviews, critiques, etc and began to give way to fanboyism and conflating the personal life of the author and their work- famous and/or prolific authors became as much a character as their actual fictional characters in terms of evaluating a story's merit. This tendency never really left and has proliferated and been established with a religious fervor in academic institutions from grade school to grad school.

The seeds for this new approach to critical analysis may have been planted even earlier- in many ways authors like Mark Twain and Jules Verne became even bigger than their fiction- but you really see this cliquish mindset in the literature world start to take root in the twenties when you had the avente-garde Fitzgeralds, Hemingways, Faulkners, and Steins cavorting around. They were uber-celebrity playboys and girls of their day and critics couldn't help but get caught up in it.

As an example, Gertrude Stein is among the- if not the- single most overrated and unjustifiably idolized figure in all of "serious" American literature; her legacy and supposed import to the craft is a total academic fabrication.


Literary scholars love Kafka as a character, his life-story seems so poetically tragic. All that said, I find Metamorphosis a fantastic read.