Born in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka grew up in a middle-class family. He studied jurisprudence, then spent his entire life working in law. Despite a few flings, he never married. He spent his free time writing at night—the novella Metamorphosis, for instance, the tale of a man who becomes a giant insect, and the novel The Castle. Kafka published only a few works before his death, in 1924, and never achieved any great renown. He entrusted his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to burn his remaining writings, which Brod did not do. Kafka is now firmly in the canon and there’s been no shortage of interest in his amorphous life, seen most recently in this year’s best-selling translation of The Diaries of Franz Kafka. A supplement to that book is this Morgan Library & Museum exhibition—organized in collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford—which includes Kafka’s drawings, personal notebooks, family photographs, and other biographical material. —Jack Sullivan