How Much Did Franz Kafka Write?

Kafka is one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and one of the least productive by any measurable standard. He published almost nothing while he was alive, finished none of his three novels, and instructed his executor to burn the rest. What survives is small enough to hold in two hands.

A Career That Fits on One Shelf

Here is the whole of what Kafka put into print while he was alive. Betrachtung, a collection of very short prose pieces, dated 1912. Der Heizer, the opening chapter of the novel that became Amerika, in 1913. Das Urteil, or The Judgment, also 1913. Die Verwandlung, The Metamorphosis, in 1915. In der Strafkolonie, In the Penal Colony, and the story collection Ein Landarzt, both 1919. The collection Ein Hungerkünstler appeared around the time of his death in June 1924.

The picture inverts if you count what he wrote privately. Kafka's diaries run from 1909 to 1923 and fill a substantial volume on their own. His correspondence is larger still: the letters to Felice Bauer alone, written mostly between 1912 and 1917 and often at a rate of more than one a day, make a book longer than any novel he attempted. So he wrote constantly and published almost none of it.

Every one of those is short. Together they would make a modest paperback. The three novels people actually associate with his name, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, were all unfinished, and all were published by Max Brod in defiance of Kafka's written instruction to destroy the manuscripts unread.

So the answer to how much Kafka wrote depends on whether you count what he finished, what he published, or what survived somebody else's decision to ignore his last request.

The One Night We Can Actually Measure

On the night of 22 September 1912 Kafka sat down after his family had gone to bed and wrote The Judgment from beginning to end. He recorded it in his diary the next day: ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning, one sitting, with legs so stiff from the desk that he could hardly pull them out from under it. Eight hours, one complete story, no drafts.

That night became his private benchmark and, in a way, his curse. He wrote about it repeatedly afterwards as proof that writing could be done that way, and spent much of the next decade failing to repeat it. His diaries are full of nights that produced nothing at all, and of self-recrimination about the ones that produced a paragraph.

It's worth remembering what he was working around. Kafka held a full-time position at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, clocking out in the early afternoon, sleeping through the evening, and starting to write around eleven at night. The full structure is on what time of day Kafka wrote, and the conditions he wrote in are on where Kafka wrote.

How Long the Books Are

The Metamorphosis is usually described as running about seventy printed pages, and the word count you'll find quoted is around 21,000. The Trial is commonly given near 48,000 words and The Castle near 88,000. All three figures come from reading-length aggregators rather than publishers, and the two novels are unfinished, so what you're measuring is what Brod assembled rather than what Kafka intended.

Put the whole of it together and Kafka's complete fiction fits in a single volume. Set that against Proust, whose one novel runs to roughly 1.2 million words, or against Stephen King's sixty-plus books. Influence and volume have almost nothing to do with each other.

What You Can Steal

• One good night can produce a finished thing. Kafka wrote The Judgment in eight hours. Clear the evening, kill the interruptions, and see what happens.
• Don't build your standard on your best night. Kafka measured every subsequent session against September 1912 and mostly made himself miserable.
• Volume is not influence. Six slim books in a lifetime reshaped the century's fiction.
• Write around the job. Kafka's entire body of work was produced in the hours between a day job and dawn, and the job never went away.