One of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, Franz Kafka penned novels and short stories that portray the bewildered alienation of modern society. His characters frequently find themselves in threatening situations for which there is no explanation and from which there is no escape. Writing in the Bookman, Edwin Muir found that "the four main ideas which run through Kafka's work may be condensed into four axioms. The first two are that, compared with the divine law, no matter how unjust it may sometimes appear to us, all human effort, even the highest, is in the wrong; and that always whatever our minds or our feelings may tell us, the claim of the divine law to unconditional reverence and obedience is absolute. The other two are complementary: that there is a right way of life, and that its discovery depends on one's attitude to powers which are almost unknown."
In an article for the New Yorker, John Updike explained: "The century since Franz Kafka was born has been marked by the idea of 'modernism' a self-consciousness new among centuries, a consciousness of being new.
