Franz Kafka, Der Verschollene / Amerika [Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared]

Christopher Reid (Harvard University)

Ed. by Jennifer Marston William, Purdue University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.4.2: German-language Writing and Culture: Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, 800-present.
Vol. editors: Gerhard P. Knapp (University of Utah), Jennifer Marston William (Purdue University), Herbert Rowland (Purdue University), Jill E. Twark (East Carolina University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1912 - 1924

Places

Czech Republic (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Der Verschollene (published in English as Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared) is a novel fragment published posthumously in 1927 by the author's friend and publisher, Max Brod, under the title Amerika. The first chapter of the novel was printed separately in 1913 as a short story by the Kurt Wolff Verlag under the title Der Heizer: Ein Fragment. Kafka expressed characteristic dissatisfaction about the novel to Felice Bauer in a letter dated 10 March 1913, asserting that he had written “550 useless pages” (Kafka 1999: 129). Only the first chapter (“Der Heizer”), he maintained, had “inner truth” (Kafka 1999: 1…

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1951 words

Citation: Reid, Christopher. "Der Verschollene / Amerika". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 April 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=24879, accessed 20 April 2024.]

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