Franz Kafka's so-called 'Letter to His Father' is the most detailed and significant autobiographical testimony that the world-famous Prague writer has left for posterity. He himself referred to the more than one hundred handwritten pages simply as the 'Giant Letter.' Kafka was already 36 years old and at the peak of his literary career when he worked on it at the end of 1919, in a desperate attempt to construct a framework of sober words around a father-son relationship marked by pain, fear, and distance. The attempt failed: Franz Kafka died just under five years later, without having sent the letter or given it to his father.