The Trial

The Trial (German: Der Prozess) is a German-language novel written by Czech writer Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a bank official arrested and prosecuted by an inaccessible authority, with the nature of the crime of which he is accused revealed neither to him nor to the reader. The novel shows K. as he tries to navigate through an absurdly bureaucratic legal system as well as his social alienation as he attempts to clear his name. Some similarities between The Trial and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov suggest their possible influence on it, and Kafka went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's two other novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter that appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending. After Kafka's death in 1924, his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.