Writings by and about Kafka and textual notes accompany his translations of his early twentieth-century work about Gregor Samsa, an ordinary man who wakes up one morning only to discover that he has been transformed into a monstrous insect and must deal with his physical alteration, as well as the alienation from his family. Reprint When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing -- though absurdly comic -- meditation on human feelings of inadequecy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the mosst widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man. Introduction xi Stanley Corngold The Metamorphosis translated 1(60) Stanley Corngold A Note on the Text 59(2) Explanatory Notes to the Text 61(42) Documents 103(10) Letter by Franz Kafka to Max Brod, October 8, 1912 105(2) Sokel's Comments 107(2) Two Conversations between Kafka and Gustav Janouch, 1920--1923 109(2) Kafka to his Father, November 1919 111(1) Entries in Kafka's Diaries 111(2) Critical Essays 113(82) Franz Kafka 115(18) Wilhelm Emrich Kafka's Obscurity 133(5) Ralph Freedman The Making of Allegory 138(5) Edwin Honig Kafka's Conception (Thematik) of Being 143(4) Max Bense Kafka's Fantasy of Punishment 147(10) Hellmuth Kaiser Franz Kafka's ``Metamorphosis'' as a Death and Resurrection Fantasy 157(12) Peter Dow Webster Education for Tragedy 169(18) Walter H. Sokel The Writer Franz Kafka 187(2) Friedrich Beissner Kafka the Poet 189(2) Commentary 191(1) ``The Metamorphosis'' 192(3) Hellmut Richter Selected Bibliography 195