Considered one of the first truly modern writers and an inspiration for psychological horror, Kafka was himself a rather meek person who led a mostly uneventful existence. Spending most of his life as a clerk in a Prague insurance firm, Kafka delved into the corridors and dark recesses of his mind, producing a number of quite remarkable short stories and unfinished novels that expressed the bleak paranoia and bureaucratic hopelessness of life in the modern world.