Word: samsa
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...
With this sentence, Franz Kafka begins The Metamorphosis, a novelette filled with the Czech author's own terrified and terrifying sense of life. Gregor Samsa, a timid, unsuccessful salesman slaving for his family feels rejected and unwanted. At the end, he hears his sister say of his insect-self, "We must try to get rid of it." The Metamorphosis appears, with 43 other Kafka stories and "short pieces," in The Penal Colony, a collection recently published in the U.S. Like the more famous novels, The Trial and The Castle (TIME, April 28, 1947), all the stories are marked with...