title: Rock music

text: If hardcore most directly pursued the stripped down aesthetic of punk, and new wave came to represent its commercial wing, post-punk emerged in the later 1970s and early 1980s as its more artistic and challenging side. Major influences beside punk bands were the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, and the New York-based no wave scene which placed an emphasis on performance, including bands such as James Chance and the Contortions, DNA and Sonic Youth. Early contributors to the genre included the US bands Pere Ubu, Devo, the Residents and Talking Heads.


title: Rock music

text: The first wave of British post-punk included Gang of Four, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division, who placed less emphasis on art than their US counterparts and more on the dark emotional qualities of their music. Bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Cure, and the Sisters of Mercy, moved increasingly in this direction to found Gothic rock, which had become the basis of a major sub-culture by the early 1980s. Similar emotional territory was pursued by Australian acts like the Birthday Party and Nick Cave. Members of Bauhaus and Joy Division explored new stylistic territory as Love and Rockets and New Order respectively. Another early post-punk movement was the industrial music developed by British bands Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, and New York-based Suicide, using a variety of electronic and sampling techniques that emulated the sound of industrial production and which would develop into a variety of forms of post-industrial music in the 1980s.


title: Rock music

text: The second generation of British post-punk bands that broke through in the early 1980s, including the Fall, the Pop Group, the Mekons, Echo and the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes, tended to move away from dark sonic landscapes. Arguably the most successful band to emerge from post-punk was Ireland's U2, who incorporated elements of religious imagery together with political commentary into their often anthemic music, and by the late 1980s had become one of the biggest bands in the world. Although many post-punk bands continued to record and perform, it declined as a movement in the mid-1980s as acts disbanded or moved off to explore other musical areas, but it has continued to influence the development of rock music and has been seen as a major element in the creation of the alternative rock movement.


title: Rock music

text: The term alternative rock was coined in the early 1980s to describe rock artists who did not fit into the mainstream genres of the time. Bands dubbed "alternative" had no unified style, but were all seen as distinct from mainstream music. Alternative bands were linked by their collective debt to punk rock, through hardcore, New Wave or the post-punk movements. Important alternative rock bands of the 1980s in the US included R.E.M., Hüsker Dü, Jane's Addiction, Sonic Youth, and the Pixies, and in the UK the Cure, New Order, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and the Smiths. Artists were largely confined to independent record labels, building an extensive underground music scene based on college radio, fanzines, touring, and word-of-mouth. They rejected the dominant synth-pop of the early 1980s, marking a return to group-based guitar rock.


title: Rock music

text: Few of these early bands achieved mainstream success, although exceptions to this rule include R.E.M., the Smiths, and the Cure. Despite a general lack of spectacular album sales, the original alternative rock bands exerted a considerable influence on the generation of musicians who came of age in the 1980s and ended up breaking through to mainstream success in the 1990s. Styles of alternative rock in the US during the 1980s included jangle pop, associated with the early recordings of R.E.M., which incorporated the ringing guitars of mid-1960s pop and rock, and college rock, used to describe alternative bands that began in the college circuit and college radio, including acts such as 10,000 Maniacs and the Feelies. In the UK, Gothic rock was dominant in the early 1980s, but by the end of the decade, indie or dream pop like Primal Scream, Bogshed, Half Man Half Biscuit and the Wedding Present, and what were dubbed shoegaze bands like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Ride and Lush entered. Particularly vibrant was the Madchester scene, producing such bands as Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets and the Stone Roses. The next decade would see the success of grunge in the US and Britpop in the UK, bringing alternative rock into the mainstream.


title: Rock music

text: Disaffected by commercialized and highly produced pop and rock in the mid-1980s, bands in Washington state (particularly in the Seattle area) formed a new style of rock which sharply contrasted with the mainstream music of the time. The developing genre came to be known as "grunge", a term descriptive of the dirty sound of the music and the unkempt appearance of most musicians, who actively rebelled against the over-groomed images of other artists. Grunge fused elements of hardcore punk and heavy metal into a single sound, and made heavy use of guitar distortion, fuzz and feedback. The lyrics were typically apathetic and angst-filled, and often concerned themes such as social alienation and entrapment, although it was also known for its dark humor and parodies of commercial rock.


title: Rock music

text: Bands such as Green River, Soundgarden, Melvins and Skin Yard pioneered the genre, with Mudhoney becoming the most successful by the end of the decade. Grunge remained largely a local phenomenon until 1991, when Nirvana's album "Nevermind" became a huge success, containing the anthemic song "Smells Like Teen Spirit". "Nevermind" was more melodic than its predecessors, by signing to Geffen Records the band was one of the first to employ traditional corporate promotion and marketing mechanisms such as an MTV video, in store displays and the use of radio "consultants" who promoted airplay at major mainstream rock stations. During 1991 and 1992, other grunge albums such as Pearl Jam's "Ten", Soundgarden's "Badmotorfinger" and Alice in Chains' "Dirt", along with the "Temple of the Dog" album featuring members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, became among the 100 top-selling albums. Major record labels signed most of the remaining grunge bands in Seattle, while a second influx of acts moved to the city in the hope of success. However, with the death of Kurt Cobain and the subsequent break-up of Nirvana in 1994, touring problems for Pearl Jam and the departure of Alice in Chains' lead singer Layne Staley in 1998, the genre began to decline, partly to be overshadowed by Britpop and more commercial sounding post-grunge.


title: Rock music

text: Britpop emerged from the British alternative rock scene of the early 1990s and was characterised by bands particularly influenced by British guitar music of the 1960s and 1970s. The Smiths were a major influence, as were bands of the Madchester scene, which had dissolved in the early 1990s. The movement has been seen partly as a reaction against various US-based, musical and cultural trends in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly the grunge phenomenon and as a reassertion of a British rock identity. Britpop was varied in style, but often used catchy tunes and hooks, beside lyrics with particularly British concerns and the adoption of the iconography of the 1960s British Invasion, including the symbols of British identity previously used by the mods. It was launched around 1993 with releases by groups such as Suede and Blur, who were soon joined by others including Oasis, Pulp, Supergrass, and Elastica, who produced a series of successful albums and singles. For a while the contest between Blur and Oasis was built by the popular press into the "Battle of Britpop", initially won by Blur, but with Oasis achieving greater long-term and international success, directly influencing later Britpop bands, such as Ocean Colour Scene and Kula Shaker. Britpop groups brought British alternative rock into the mainstream and formed the backbone of a larger British cultural movement known as Cool Britannia. Although its more popular bands, particularly Blur and Oasis, were able to spread their commercial success overseas, especially to the United States, the movement had largely fallen apart by the end of the decade.


title: Rock music

text: The term post-grunge was coined for the generation of bands that followed the emergence into the mainstream and subsequent hiatus of the Seattle grunge bands. Post-grunge bands emulated their attitudes and music, but with a more radio-friendly commercially oriented sound. Often they worked through the major labels and came to incorporate diverse influences from jangle pop, pop-punk, alternative metal or hard rock. The term post-grunge originally was meant to be pejorative, suggesting that they were simply musically derivative, or a cynical response to an "authentic" rock movement. Originally, grunge bands that emerged when grunge was mainstream and were suspected of emulating the grunge sound were pejoratively labelled as post-grunge. From 1994, former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl's new band, the Foo Fighters, helped popularize the genre and define its parameters.


title: Rock music

text: Some post-grunge bands, like Candlebox, were from Seattle, but the subgenre was marked by a broadening of the geographical base of grunge, with bands like Los Angeles' Audioslave, and Georgia's Collective Soul and beyond the US to Australia's Silverchair and Britain's Bush, who all cemented post-grunge as one of the most commercially viable subgenres of the late 1990s. Although male bands predominated post-grunge, female solo artist Alanis Morissette's 1995 album "Jagged Little Pill", labelled as post-grunge, also became a multi-platinum hit. Post-grunge morphed during the late 1990s as post-grunge bands like Creed and Nickelback emerged. Bands like Creed and Nickelback took post-grunge into the 21st century with considerable commercial success, abandoning most of the angst and anger of the original movement for more conventional anthems, narratives and romantic songs, and were followed in this vein by newer acts including Shinedown, Seether, 3 Doors Down and Puddle of Mudd.


title: Rock music

text: The origins of 1990s pop punk can be seen in the more song-oriented bands of the 1970s punk movement like Buzzcocks and the Clash, commercially successful new wave acts such as the Jam and the Undertones, and the more hardcore-influenced elements of alternative rock in the 1980s. Pop-punk tends to use power-pop melodies and chord changes with speedy punk tempos and loud guitars. Punk music provided the inspiration for some California-based bands on independent labels in the early 1990s, including Rancid, Pennywise, Weezer and Green Day. In 1994 Green Day moved to a major label and produced the album "Dookie", which found a new, largely teenage, audience and proved a surprise diamond-selling success, leading to a series of hit singles, including two number ones in the US. They were soon followed by the eponymous debut from Weezer, which spawned three top ten singles in the US. This success opened the door for the multi-platinum sales of metallic punk band the Offspring with "Smash" (1994). This first wave of pop punk reached its commercial peak with Green Day's "Nimrod" (1997) and the Offspring's "Americana" (1998).


title: Rock music

text: A second wave of pop punk was spearheaded by Blink-182, with their breakthrough album "Enema of the State" (1999), followed by bands such as Good Charlotte, Simple Plan and Sum 41, who made use of humour in their videos and had a more radio-friendly tone to their music, while retaining the speed, some of the attitude and even the look of 1970s punk. Later pop-punk bands, including All Time Low, the All-American Rejects and Fall Out Boy, had a sound that has been described as closer to 1980s hardcore, while still achieving commercial success.


title: Rock music

text: In the 1980s the terms indie rock and alternative rock were used interchangeably. By the mid-1990s, as elements of the movement began to attract mainstream interest, particularly grunge and then Britpop, post-grunge and pop-punk, the term alternative began to lose its meaning. Those bands following the less commercial contours of the scene were increasingly referred to by the label indie. They characteristically attempted to retain control of their careers by releasing albums on their own or small independent labels, while relying on touring, word-of-mouth, and airplay on independent or college radio stations for promotion. Linked by an ethos more than a musical approach, the indie rock movement encompassed a wide range of styles, from hard-edged, grunge-influenced bands like the Cranberries and Superchunk, through do-it-yourself experimental bands like Pavement, to punk-folk singers such as Ani DiFranco. It has been noted that indie rock has a relatively high proportion of female artists compared with preceding rock genres, a tendency exemplified by the development of feminist-informed Riot grrrl music. Many countries have developed an extensive local indie scene, flourishing with bands with enough popularity to survive inside the respective country, but virtually unknown outside them.


title: Rock music

text: By the end of the 1990s many recognisable subgenres, most with their origins in the late 1980s alternative movement, were included under the umbrella of indie. Lo-fi eschewed polished recording techniques for a D.I.Y. ethos and was spearheaded by Beck, Sebadoh and Pavement. The work of Talk Talk and Slint helped inspire both post rock, an experimental style influenced by jazz and electronic music, pioneered by Bark Psychosis and taken up by acts such as Tortoise, Stereolab, and Laika, as well as leading to more dense and complex, guitar-based math rock, developed by acts like Polvo and Chavez. Space rock looked back to progressive roots, with drone heavy and minimalist acts like Spacemen 3, the two bands created out of its split, Spectrum and Spiritualized, and later groups including Flying Saucer Attack, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Quickspace. In contrast, Sadcore emphasised pain and suffering through melodic use of acoustic and electronic instrumentation in the music of bands like American Music Club and Red House Painters, while the revival of baroque pop reacted against lo-fi and experimental music by placing an emphasis on melody and classical instrumentation, with artists like Arcade Fire, Belle and Sebastian and Rufus Wainwright.


title: Rock music

text: Alternative metal emerged from the hardcore scene of alternative rock in the US in the later 1980s, but gained a wider audience after grunge broke into the mainstream in the early 1990s. Early alternative metal bands mixed a wide variety of genres with hardcore and heavy metal sensibilities, with acts like Jane's Addiction and Primus using progressive rock, Soundgarden and Corrosion of Conformity using garage punk, the Jesus Lizard and Helmet mixing noise rock, Ministry and Nine Inch Nails influenced by industrial music, Monster Magnet moving into psychedelia, Pantera, Sepultura and White Zombie creating groove metal, while Biohazard, Limp Bizkit and Faith No More turned to hip hop and rap.


title: Rock music

text: Hip hop had gained attention from rock acts in the early 1980s, including the Clash with "The Magnificent Seven" (1980) and Blondie with "Rapture" (1980). Early crossover acts included Run DMC and the Beastie Boys. Detroit rapper Esham became known for his "acid rap" style, which fused rapping with a sound that was often based in rock and heavy metal. Rappers who sampled rock songs included Ice-T, the Fat Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy and Whodini. The mixing of thrash metal and rap was pioneered by Anthrax on their 1987 comedy-influenced single "I'm the Man".


title: Rock music

text: In 1990, Faith No More broke into the mainstream with their single "Epic", often seen as the first truly successful combination of heavy metal with rap. This paved the way for the success of existing bands like 24-7 Spyz and Living Colour, and new acts including Rage Against the Machine and Red Hot Chili Peppers, who all fused rock and hip hop among other influences. Among the first wave of performers to gain mainstream success as rap rock were 311, Bloodhound Gang, and Kid Rock. A more metallic sound"nu metal"was pursued by bands including Limp Bizkit, Korn and Slipknot. Later in the decade this style, which contained a mix of grunge, punk, metal, rap and turntable scratching, spawned a wave of successful bands like Linkin Park, P.O.D. and Staind, who were often classified as rap metal or nu metal, the first of which are the best-selling band of the genre.


title: Rock music

text: In 2001, nu metal reached its peak with albums like Staind's "Break the Cycle", P.O.D's "Satellite", Slipknot's "Iowa" and Linkin Park's "Hybrid Theory". New bands also emerged like Disturbed, Godsmack and Papa Roach, whose major label début "Infest" became a platinum hit. Korn's long-awaited fifth album "Untouchables", and Papa Roach's second album "Lovehatetragedy", did not sell as well as their previous releases, while nu metal bands were played more infrequently on rock radio stations and MTV began focusing on pop punk and emo. Since then, many bands have changed to a more conventional hard rock, heavy metal, or electronic music sound.


title: Rock music

text: From about 1997, as dissatisfaction grew with the concept of Cool Britannia, and Britpop as a movement began to dissolve, emerging bands began to avoid the Britpop label while still producing music derived from it. Many of these bands tended to mix elements of British traditional rock (or British trad rock), particularly the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Small Faces, with American influences, including post-grunge. Drawn from across the United Kingdom (with several important bands emerging from the north of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), the themes of their music tended to be less parochially centered on British, English and London life and more introspective than had been the case with Britpop at its height. This, beside a greater willingness to engage with the American press and fans, may have helped some of them in achieving international success.


title: Rock music

text: Post-Britpop bands have been seen as presenting the image of the rock star as an ordinary person and their increasingly melodic music was criticised for being bland or derivative. Post-Britpop bands like Travis from "The Man Who" (1999), Stereophonics from "Performance and Cocktails" (1999), Feeder from "Echo Park" (2001), and particularly Coldplay from their debut album "Parachutes" (2000), achieved much wider international success than most of the Britpop groups that had preceded them, and were some of the most commercially successful acts of the late 1990s and early 2000s, arguably providing a launchpad for the subsequent garage rock or post-punk revival, which has also been seen as a reaction to their introspective brand of rock.


title: Rock music

text: Post-hardcore developed in the US, particularly in the Chicago and Washington, DC areas, in the early to mid-1980s, with bands that were inspired by the do-it-yourself ethics and guitar-heavy music of hardcore punk, but influenced by post-punk, adopting longer song formats, more complex musical structures and sometimes more melodic vocal styles.


title: Rock music

text: Emo also emerged from the hardcore scene in 1980s Washington, D.C., initially as "emocore", used as a term to describe bands who favored expressive vocals over the more common abrasive, barking style. The early emo scene operated as an underground, with short-lived bands releasing small-run vinyl records on tiny independent labels. Emo broke into mainstream culture in the early 2000s with the platinum-selling success of Jimmy Eat World's "Bleed American" (2001) and Dashboard Confessional's "The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most" (2003). The new emo had a much more mainstream sound than in the 1990s and a far greater appeal amongst adolescents than its earlier incarnations. At the same time, use of the term emo expanded beyond the musical genre, becoming associated with fashion, a hairstyle and any music that expressed emotion. By 2003 post-hardcore bands had also caught the attention of major labels and began to enjoy mainstream success in the album charts. A number of these bands were seen as a more aggressive offshoot of emo and given the often vague label of screamo.


title: Rock music

text: In the early 2000s, a new group of bands that played a stripped down and back-to-basics version of guitar rock, emerged into the mainstream. They were variously characterised as part of a garage rock, post-punk or New Wave revival. Because the bands came from across the globe, cited diverse influences (from traditional blues, through New Wave to grunge), and adopted differing styles of dress, their unity as a genre has been disputed. There had been attempts to revive garage rock and elements of punk in the 1980s and 1990s and by 2000 scenes had grown up in several countries.


title: Rock music

text: The commercial breakthrough from these scenes was led by four bands: the Strokes, who emerged from the New York club scene with their début album "Is This It" (2001); the White Stripes, from Detroit, with their third album "White Blood Cells" (2001); the Hives from Sweden after their compilation album "Your New Favourite Band" (2001); and the Vines from Australia with "Highly Evolved" (2002). They were christened by the media as the "The" bands, and dubbed "The saviours of rock 'n' roll", leading to accusations of hype. A second wave of bands that gained international recognition due to the movement included Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, the Killers, Interpol and Kings of Leon from the US, the Libertines, Arctic Monkeys, Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand from the UK, Jet from Australia, and the Datsuns and the D4 from New Zealand.


title: Rock music

text: In the 2000s, as computer technology became more accessible and music software advanced, it became possible to create high quality music using little more than a single laptop computer. This resulted in a massive increase in the amount of home-produced electronic music available to the general public via the expanding internet, and new forms of performance such as laptronica and live coding. These techniques also began to be used by existing bands and by developing genres that mixed rock with digital techniques and sounds, including indie electronic, electroclash, dance-punk and new rave.


title: Rock music

text: During the 2010s, rock music saw a decline in mainstream popularity and cultural relevancy and by 2017, hip hop music had surpassed it as the most consumed musical genre in the United States. Critics in the latter half of the decade took notice of the genre's waning popularity, citing the popularity of hip hop electronic dance music, the rise of streaming and the advent of technology which has changed approaches toward music creation as being factors. Ken Partridge of Genius suggested that hip-hop became more popular because it is a more transformative genre and does not need to rely on past sounds and that there is a direct connection to the decline of rock music and changing social attitudes during the 2010s. Bill Flanagan, in a 2016 opinion piece for "The New York Times", compared the state of rock during this period to the state of jazz in the early 1980s, "slowing down and looking back." "Vice" suggests that this decline in popularity could actually benefit the genre by attracting outsiders with "something to prove and nothing to gain."


title: Rock music

text: Despite rock's decline in mainstream popularity, some rock bands and groups have continued to achieve mainstream success in the 2010s and 2020s, including Tool, Fall Out Boy, Greta Van Fleet, Panic! at the Disco, Twenty One Pilots, Walk the Moon, Portugal. The Man, the Black Keys, Avenged Sevenfold., Dreamcatcher and Foo Fighters.


title: Rock music

text: Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus brought extreme changes to the rock scene worldwide. Restrictions, such as quarantine rules, caused widespread cancellations and postponements of concerts, tours, festivals, album releases, award ceremonies, and competitions. Some artists resorted to giving online performances to keep their careers active. Another scheme to circumvent the quarantine limitations was used at a concert of Danish rock musician Mads Langer: the audience watched the performance from inside their cars, much like in a drive-in theater. Musically, the pandemic led to a surge in new releases from the slower, less energetic, and more acoustic subgenres of rock music. The industry raised funds to help itself through efforts such as Crew Nation, a relief fund for live music crews organised by Livenation.


title: Rock music

text: At the start of the 2020s, recording artists in both pop and rap music released popular pop-punk recordings, many of them produced or assisted by Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. Representing a commercial resurgence for the genre, these acts included Machine Gun Kelly, Willow Smith, Trippie Redd, Halsey, Yungblud, and Olivia Rodrigo. The popularity of the social media platform TikTok helped spark nostalgia for the angst-driven musical style among young listeners during the pandemic. Among the most successful of these releases have been Machine Gun Kelly's 2020 album "Tickets to My Downfall", which topped the "Billboard" 200, and Rodrigo's number-one hit single "Good 4 U" (2021).


title: Rock music

text: In the mid-to-late 2010s and early 2020s, a new wave of post-punk bands from Britain and Ireland emerged. The groups in this scene have been described with the term "Crank Wave" by "NME" and The Quietus in 2019, and as "Post-Brexit New Wave" by NPR writer Matthew Perpetua in 2021. Artists that have been identified as part of the style include Black Midi, Wet Leg, Squid, Black Country, New Road, Dry Cleaning, Shame, Sleaford Mods, Fontaines D.C., The Murder Capital, Idles and Yard Act. Post-punk artists that attained prominence in the 2010s and early 2020s from other countries besides the UK included Parquet Courts, Protomartyr and Geese (United States), Preoccupations (Canada), Iceage (Denmark), and Viagra Boys (Sweden).


title: Rock music

text: Different subgenres of rock were adopted by, and became central to, the identity of a large number of sub-cultures. In the 1950s and 1960s, respectively, British youths adopted the Teddy Boy and Rocker subcultures, which revolved around US rock and roll. The counterculture of the 1960s was closely associated with psychedelic rock. The mid-late 1970s punk subculture began in the US, but it was given a distinctive look by British designer Vivienne Westwood, a look which spread worldwide. Out of the punk scene, the Goth and Emo subcultures grew, both of which presented distinctive visual styles.


title: Rock music

text: When an international rock culture developed, it supplanted cinema as the major sources of fashion influence. Paradoxically, followers of rock music have often mistrusted the world of fashion, which has been seen as elevating image above substance. Rock fashions have been seen as combining elements of different cultures and periods, as well as expressing divergent views on sexuality and gender, and rock music in general has been noted and criticised for facilitating greater sexual freedom. Rock has also been associated with various forms of drug use, including the amphetamines taken by mods in the early to mid-1960s, through the LSD, mescaline, hashish and other hallucinogenic drugs linked with psychedelic rock in the mid-late 1960s and early 1970s; and sometimes to cannabis, cocaine and heroin, all of which have been eulogised in song.


title: Rock music

text: Rock has been credited with changing attitudes to race by opening up African-American culture to white audiences; but at the same time, rock has been accused of appropriating and exploiting that culture. While rock music has absorbed many influences and introduced Western audiences to different musical traditions, the global spread of rock music has been interpreted as a form of cultural imperialism. Rock music inherited the folk tradition of protest song, making political statements on subjects such as war, religion, poverty, civil rights, justice and the environment. Political activism reached a mainstream peak with the "Do They Know It's Christmas?" single (1984) and Live Aid concert for Ethiopia in 1985, which, while successfully raising awareness of world poverty and funds for aid, have also been criticised (along with similar events), for providing a stage for self-aggrandisement and increased profits for the rock stars involved.


title: Rock music

text: Since its early development, rock music has been associated with rebellion against social and political norms, most obviously in early rock and roll's rejection of an adult-dominated culture, the counterculture's rejection of consumerism and conformity and punk's rejection of all forms of social convention, however, it can also be seen as providing a means of commercial exploitation of such ideas and of diverting youth away from political action.


title: Rock music

text: Professional women instrumentalists are uncommon in rock genres such as heavy metal although bands such as Within Temptation have featured women as lead singers with men playing instruments. According to Schaap and Berkers, "playing in a band is largely a male homosocial activity, that is, learning to play in a band is largely a peer-based ... experience, shaped by existing sex-segregated friendship networks. They note that rock music "is often defined as a form of male rebellion vis-à-vis female bedroom culture." (The theory of "bedroom culture" argues that society influences girls to not engage in crime and deviance by virtually trapping them in their bedroom; it was developed by a sociologist named Angela McRobbie.) In popular music, there has been a gendered "distinction between public (male) and private (female) participation" in music. "Several scholars have argued that men exclude women from bands or from the bands' rehearsals, recordings, performances, and other social activities". "Women are mainly regarded as passive and private consumers of allegedly slick, prefabricatedhence, inferiorpop music ..., excluding them from participating as high status rock musicians". One of the reasons that there are rarely mixed gender bands is that "bands operate as tight-knit units in which homosocial solidaritysocial bonds between people of the same sex ... plays a crucial role". In the 1960s rock music scene, "singing was sometimes an acceptable pastime for a girl, but playing an instrument ... simply wasn't done".


title: Rock music

text: "The rebellion of rock music was largely a male rebellion; the womenoften, in the 1950s and '60s, girls in their teensin rock usually sang songs as personæ utterly dependent on their macho boyfriends ...". Philip Auslander says that "Although there were many women in rock by the late 1960s, most performed only as singers, a traditionally feminine position in popular music". Though some women played instruments in American all-female garage rock bands, none of these bands achieved more than regional success. So they "did not provide viable templates for women's on-going participation in rock". In relation to the gender composition of heavy metal bands, it has been said that "[h]eavy metal performers are almost exclusively male" "...at least until the mid-1980s" apart from "...exceptions such as Girlschool". However, "...now [in the 2010s] maybe more than ever–strong metal women have put up their dukes and got down to it", "carv[ing] out a considerable place for [them]selves." When Suzi Quatro emerged in 1973, "no other prominent female musician worked in rock simultaneously as a singer, instrumentalist, songwriter, and bandleader". According to Auslander, she was "kicking down the male door in rock and roll and proving that a female "musician" ... and this is a point I am extremely concerned about ... could play as well if not better than the boys".


title: Rock music

text: An all-female band is a musical group in genres such as rock and blues which is exclusively composed of female musicians. This is distinct from a girl group, in which the female members are solely vocalists, though this terminology is not universally followed.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the short story "The Metamorphosis" and novels "The Trial" and "The Castle". The term "" has entered English to describe absurd situations, like those depicted in his writing.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka was born into a middle-class German-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today the capital of the Czech Republic. He trained as a lawyer and after completing his legal education was employed full-time by an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died in obscurity in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka was a prolific writer, spending most of his free time writing, often late in the night. He burned an estimated 90% of his total work due to his persistent struggles with self-doubt. Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime: the story collections "Contemplation" and "A Country Doctor", and individual stories (such as "The Metamorphosis") were published in literary magazines but received little public attention. In his will, Kafka instructed his literary executor and friend Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels "The Trial", "The Castle", and , but Brod ignored these instructions, and had much of his work published.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Franz Kafka is among those artists who only reached fame after their deaths: it was only after 1945 that his work became famous in German-speaking countries, whose literature it has since greatly influenced, and in the 1960s elsewhere in the world. Kafka's work has influenced a range of writers, critics, artists, and philosophers during the 20th and 21st centuries.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka was born near the Old Town Square in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family were German-speaking middle-class Ashkenazi Jews. His father, Hermann Kafka (1854–1931), was the fourth child of Jakob Kafka, a or ritual slaughterer in Osek, a Czech village with a large Jewish population located near Strakonice in southern Bohemia. Hermann brought the Kafka family to Prague. After working as a travelling sales representative, he eventually became a fashion retailer who employed up to 15 people and used the image of a jackdaw ( in Czech, pronounced and colloquially written as "kafka") as his business logo. Kafka's mother, Julie (1856–1934), was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a prosperous retail merchant in Poděbrady, and was better educated than her husband.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka's parents probably spoke German, influenced by Yiddish, that was sometimes pejoratively called Mauscheldeutsch, but, as German was considered the vehicle of social mobility, they probably encouraged their children to speak Standard German. Hermann and Julie had six children, of whom Franz was the eldest. Franz's two brothers, Georg and Heinrich, died in infancy before Franz was seven; his three sisters were Gabriele ("Ellie") (1889–1944), Valerie ("Valli") (1890–1942) and Ottilie ("Ottla") (1892–1943). All three were murdered in the Holocaust of World War II. Valli was deported to the Łódź Ghetto in occupied Poland in 1942, but that is the last documentation of her; it is assumed she did not survive the war. Ottilie was Kafka's favourite sister.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Hermann is described by the biographer Stanley Corngold as a "huge, selfish, overbearing businessman" and by Franz Kafka as "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature". On business days, both parents were absent from the home, with Julie Kafka working as many as 12 hours each day helping to manage the family business. Consequently, Kafka's childhood was somewhat lonely, and the children were reared largely by a series of governesses and servants. Kafka's troubled relationship with his father is evident in his ("Letter to His Father") of more than 100 pages, in which he complains of being profoundly affected by his father's authoritarian and demanding character; his mother, in contrast, was quiet and shy. The dominating figure of Kafka's father had a significant influence on Kafka's writing.


title: Franz Kafka

text: The Kafka family had a servant girl living with them in a cramped apartment. Franz's room was often cold. In November 1913 the family moved into a bigger apartment, although Ellie and Valli had married and moved out of the first apartment. In early August 1914, just after World War I began, the sisters did not know where their husbands were in the military and moved back in with the family in this larger apartment. Both Ellie and Valli also had children. Franz at age 31 moved into Valli's former apartment, quiet by contrast, and lived by himself for the first time.


title: Franz Kafka

text: From 1889 to 1893, Kafka attended the German boys' elementary school at the (meat market), now known as Masná Street. His Jewish education ended with his "bar mitzvah" celebration at the age of 13. Kafka never enjoyed attending the synagogue and went with his father only on four high holidays a year.


title: Franz Kafka

text: After leaving elementary school in 1893, Kafka was admitted to the rigorous classics-oriented state gymnasium, , an academic secondary school at Old Town Square, within the Kinský Palace. German was the language of instruction, but Kafka also spoke and wrote in Czech. He studied the latter at the gymnasium for eight years, achieving good grades. Although Kafka received compliments for his Czech, he never considered himself fluent in the language, though he spoke German with a Czech accent. He completed his Matura exams in 1901.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Admitted to the of Prague in 1901, Kafka began studying chemistry but switched to law after two weeks. Although this field did not excite him, it offered a range of career possibilities which pleased his father. In addition, law required a longer course of study, giving Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history. He also joined a student club, (Reading and Lecture Hall of the German students), which organised literary events, readings and other activities. Among Kafka's friends were the journalist Felix Weltsch, who studied philosophy, the actor Yitzchak Lowy who came from an orthodox Hasidic Warsaw family, and the writers Ludwig Winder, Oskar Baum and Franz Werfel.


title: Franz Kafka

text: At the end of his first year of studies, Kafka met Max Brod, a fellow law student who became a close friend for life. Years later, Brod coined the term ("The Close Prague Circle") to describe the group of writers, which included Kafka, Felix Weltsch and Brod himself. Brod soon noticed that, although Kafka was shy and seldom spoke, what he said was usually profound. Kafka was an avid reader throughout his life; together he and Brod read Plato's "Protagoras" in the original Greek, on Brod's initiative, and Flaubert's and ("The Temptation of Saint Anthony") in French, at his own suggestion. Kafka considered Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustav Flaubert, Nikolai Gogol, Franz Grillparzer, and Heinrich von Kleist to be his "true blood brothers". Besides these, he took an interest in Czech literature and was also very fond of the works of Goethe. Kafka was awarded the degree of Doctor of Law on 18 June 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts.


title: Franz Kafka

text: On 1 November 1907, Kafka was hired at the , an insurance company, where he worked for nearly a year. His correspondence during that period indicates that he was unhappy with a work schedule—from 08:00 until 18:00—that made it extremely difficult to concentrate on writing, which was assuming increasing importance to him. On 15 July 1908, he resigned. Two weeks later, he found employment more amenable to writing when he joined the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. The job involved investigating and assessing compensation for personal injury to industrial workers; accidents such as lost fingers or limbs were commonplace, owing to poor work safety policies at the time. It was especially true of factories fitted with machine lathes, drills, planing machines and rotary saws, which were rarely fitted with safety guards.


title: Franz Kafka

text: The management professor Peter Drucker credits Kafka with developing the first civilian hard hat while employed at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute, but this is not supported by any document from his employer. His father often referred to his son's job as an insurance officer as a , literally "bread job", a job done only to pay the bills; Kafka often claimed to despise it. Kafka was rapidly promoted and his duties included processing and investigating compensation claims, writing reports, and handling appeals from businessmen who thought their firms had been placed in too high a risk category, which cost them more in insurance premiums. He would compile and compose the annual report on the insurance institute for the several years he worked there. The reports were well received by his superiors. Kafka usually got off work at 2 P.M., so that he had time to spend on his literary work, to which he was committed. Kafka's father also expected him to help out at and take over the family fancy goods store. In his later years, Kafka's illness often prevented him from working at the insurance bureau and at his writing.


title: Franz Kafka

text: In late 1911, Elli's husband Karl Hermann and Kafka became partners in the first asbestos factory in Prague, known as Prager Asbestwerke Hermann & Co., having used dowry money from Hermann Kafka. Kafka showed a positive attitude at first, dedicating much of his free time to the business, but he later resented the encroachment of this work on his writing time. During that period, he also found interest and entertainment in the performances of Yiddish theatre. After seeing a Yiddish theatre troupe perform in October 1911, for the next six months Kafka "immersed himself in Yiddish language and in Yiddish literature". This interest also served as a starting point for his growing exploration of Judaism. It was at about this time that Kafka became a vegetarian. Around 1915, Kafka received his draft notice for military service in World WarI, but his employers at the insurance institute arranged for a deferment because his work was considered essential government service. He later attempted to join the military but was prevented from doing so by medical problems associated with tuberculosis, with which he was diagnosed in 1917. In 1918, the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute put Kafka on a pension due to his illness, for which there was no cure at the time, and he spent most of the rest of his life in sanatoriums.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka never married. According to Brod, Kafka was "tortured" by sexual desire, and Kafka's biographer Reiner Stach states that his life was full of "incessant womanising" and that he was filled with a fear of "sexual failure". Kafka visited brothels for most of his adult life, and was interested in pornography. In addition, he had close relationships with several women during his lifetime. On 13 August 1912, Kafka met Felice Bauer, a relative of Brod, who worked in Berlin as a representative of a dictaphone company. A week after the meeting at Brod's home, Kafka wrote in his diary:


title: Franz Kafka

text: Shortly after this meeting, Kafka wrote the story "" ("The Judgment") in only one night and worked in a productive period on ("The Man Who Disappeared") and "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis"). Kafka and Felice Bauer communicated mostly through letters over the next five years, met occasionally, and were engaged twice. Kafka's extant letters to Bauer were published as ("Letters to Felice"); her letters do not survive. According to the biographers Stach and James Hawes, Kafka became engaged a third time around 1920, to Julie Wohryzek, a poor and uneducated hotel chambermaid. Although the two rented a flat and set a wedding date, the marriage never took place. During this time, Kafka began a draft of "Letter to His Father", who objected to Julie because of her Zionist beliefs. Before the date of the intended marriage, he took up with yet another woman. While he needed women and sex in his life, he had low self-confidence, felt sex was dirty, and was cripplingly shy—especially about his body.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Stach and Brod state that during the time that Kafka knew Felice Bauer, he had an affair with a friend of hers, Margarethe "Grete" Bloch, a Jewish woman from Berlin. Brod says that Bloch gave birth to Kafka's son, although Kafka never knew about the child. The boy, whose name is not known, was born in 1914 or 1915 and died in Munich in 1921. However, Kafka's biographer Peter-André Alt says that, while Bloch had a son, Kafka was not the father as the pair were never intimate. Stach points out that there is a great deal of contradictory evidence around the claim that Kafka was the father.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis in August 1917 and moved for a few months to the Bohemian village of Zürau (Siřem in Czech), where his sister Ottla worked on the farm of her brother-in-law Karl Hermann. He felt comfortable there and later described this time as perhaps the best period of his life, probably because he had no responsibilities. He kept diaries and (octavo). From the notes in these books, Kafka extracted 109 numbered pieces of text on "Zettel", single pieces of paper in no given order. They were later published as (The Zürau Aphorisms or Reflections on Sin, Hope, Suffering, and the True Way).


title: Franz Kafka

text: In 1920, Kafka began an intense relationship with Milena Jesenská, a Czech journalist and writer. His letters to her were later published as . During a vacation in July 1923 to Graal-Müritz on the Baltic Sea, Kafka met Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family. Kafka, hoping to escape the influence of his family to concentrate on his writing, moved briefly to Berlin (September 1923-March 1924) and lived with Diamant. She became his lover and sparked his interest in the Talmud. He worked on four stories, all of which were intended for publication, including ("A Hunger Artist").


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka had a lifelong suspicion that people found him mentally and physically repulsive. However, many of those who met him invariably found him to possess obvious intelligence and a sense of humour; they also found him handsome, although of austere appearance.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Brod compared Kafka to Heinrich von Kleist, noting that both writers had the ability to describe a situation realistically with precise details. Brod thought Kafka was one of the most entertaining people he had met; Kafka enjoyed sharing humour with his friends, but also helped them in difficult situations with good advice. According to Brod, he was a passionate reciter, able to phrase his speech as though it were music. Brod felt that two of Kafka's most distinguishing traits were "absolute truthfulness" () and "precise conscientiousness" (). He explored details, the inconspicuous, in depth and with such love and precision that things surfaced that were unforeseen, seemingly strange, but absolutely true ().


title: Franz Kafka

text: Although Kafka showed little interest in exercise as a child, he later developed a passion for games and physical activity, and was an accomplished rider, swimmer, and rower. On weekends, he and his friends embarked on long hikes, often planned by Kafka himself. His other interests included alternative medicine, modern education systems such as Montessori, and technological novelties such as airplanes and film. Writing was vitally important to Kafka; he considered it a "form of prayer". He was highly sensitive to noise and preferred absolute quiet when writing.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Pérez-Álvarez has claimed that Kafka may have possessed a schizoid personality disorder. His style, it is claimed, not only in "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis"), but in various other writings, appears to show low to medium-level schizoid traits, which Pérez-Álvarez claims to have influenced much of his work. His anguish can be seen in this diary entry from 21 June 1913:


title: Franz Kafka

text: Alessia Coralli and Antonio Perciaccante of San Giovanni di Dio Hospital have posited that Kafka may have had borderline personality disorder with co-occurring psychophysiological insomnia. Joan Lachkar interpreted "Die Verwandlung" as "a vivid depiction of the borderline personality" and described the story as "model for Kafka's own abandonment fears, anxiety, depression, and parasitic dependency needs. Kafka illuminated the borderline's general confusion of normal and healthy desires, wishes, and needs with something ugly and disdainful."


title: Franz Kafka

text: Though Kafka never married, he held marriage and children in high esteem. He had several girlfriends and lovers across his life. He may have suffered from an eating disorder. Doctor Manfred M. Fichter of the Psychiatric Clinic, University of Munich, presented "evidence for the hypothesis that the writer Franz Kafka had suffered from an atypical anorexia nervosa", and that Kafka was not just lonely and depressed but also "occasionally suicidal". In his 1995 book "Franz Kafka, the Jewish Patient", Sander Gilman investigated "why a Jew might have been considered 'hypochondriacal' or 'homosexual' and how Kafka incorporates aspects of these ways of understanding the Jewish male into his own self-image and writing". Kafka considered suicide at least once, in late 1912.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Prior to World War I, Kafka attended several meetings of the "Klub mladých", a Czech anarchist, anti-militarist, and anti-clerical organization. Hugo Bergmann, who attended the same elementary and high schools as Kafka, fell out with Kafka during their last academic year (1900–1901) because "[Kafka's] socialism and my Zionism were much too strident". "Franz became a socialist, I became a Zionist in 1898. The synthesis of Zionism and socialism did not yet exist". Bergmann claims that Kafka wore a red carnation to school to show his support for socialism. In one diary entry, Kafka made reference to the influential anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin: "Don't forget Kropotkin!"


title: Franz Kafka

text: During the communist era, the legacy of Kafka's work for Eastern bloc socialism was hotly debated. Opinions ranged from the notion that he satirised the bureaucratic bungling of a crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the belief that he embodied the rise of socialism. A further key point was Marx's theory of alienation. While the orthodox position was that Kafka's depictions of alienation were no longer relevant for a society that had supposedly eliminated alienation, a 1963 conference held in Liblice, Czechoslovakia, on the eightieth anniversary of his birth, reassessed the importance of Kafka's portrayal of bureaucracy. Whether or not Kafka was a political writer is still an issue of debate.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka grew up in Prague as a German-speaking Jew. He was deeply fascinated by the Jews of Eastern Europe, who he thought possessed an intensity of spiritual life that was absent from Jews in the West. His diary contains many references to Yiddish writers. Yet he was at times alienated from Judaism and Jewish life. On 8 January 1914, he wrote in his diary:


title: Franz Kafka

text: Hawes suggests that Kafka, though very aware of his own Jewishness, did not incorporate it into his work, which, according to Hawes, lacks Jewish characters, scenes or themes. In the opinion of literary critic Harold Bloom, although Kafka was uneasy with his Jewish heritage, he was the quintessential Jewish writer. Lothar Kahn is likewise unequivocal: "The presence of Jewishness in Kafka's is no longer subject to doubt". Pavel Eisner, one of Kafka's first translators, interprets ("The Trial") as the embodiment of the "triple dimension of Jewish existence in Prague... his protagonist Josef K. is (symbolically) arrested by a German (Rabensteiner), a Czech (Kullich), and a Jew (Kaminer). He stands for the 'guiltless guilt' that imbues the Jew in the modern world, although there is no evidence that he himself is a Jew".


title: Franz Kafka

text: In his essay "Sadness in Palestine?!", Dan Miron explores Kafka's connection to Zionism: "It seems that those who claim that there was such a connection and that Zionism played a central role in his life and literary work, and those who deny the connection altogether or dismiss its importance, are both wrong. The truth lies in some very elusive place between these two simplistic poles." Kafka considered moving to Palestine with Felice Bauer, and later with Dora Diamant. He studied Hebrew while living in Berlin, hiring a friend of Brod's from Palestine, Pua Bat-Tovim, to tutor him and attending Rabbi Julius Grünthal and Rabbi Julius Guttmann's classes in the Berlin (College for the Study of Judaism).


title: Franz Kafka

text: Livia Rothkirchen calls Kafka the "symbolic figure of his era". His contemporaries included numerous Jewish, Czech, and German writers who were sensitive to Jewish, Czech, and German culture. According to Rothkirchen, "This situation lent their writings a broad cosmopolitan outlook and a quality of exaltation bordering on transcendental metaphysical contemplation. An illustrious example is Franz Kafka".


title: Franz Kafka

text: Towards the end of his life Kafka sent a postcard to his friend Hugo Bergmann in Tel Aviv, announcing his intention to emigrate to Palestine. Bergmann refused to host Kafka because he had young children and was afraid that Kafka would infect them with tuberculosis.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka's laryngeal tuberculosis worsened and in March 1924 he returned from Berlin to Prague, where members of his family, principally his sister Ottla and Dora Diamant, took care of him. He went to Dr. Hoffmann's sanatorium in Kierling just outside Vienna for treatment on 10 April, and died there on 3 June 1924. The cause of death seemed to be starvation: the condition of Kafka's throat made eating too painful for him, and since parenteral nutrition had not yet been developed, there was no way to feed him. Kafka was editing "A Hunger Artist" on his deathbed, a story whose composition he had begun before his throat closed to the point that he could not take any nourishment. His body was brought back to Prague where he was buried on 11 June 1924, in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague-Žižkov. Kafka was virtually unknown during his own lifetime, but he did not consider fame important. He rose to fame rapidly after his death, particularly after World War II. The Kafka tombstone was designed by architect Leopold Ehrmann.


title: Franz Kafka

text: All of Kafka's published works, except some letters he wrote in Czech to Milena Jesenská, were written in German. What little was published during his lifetime attracted scant public attention.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka finished none of his full-length novels and burned around 90 percent of his work, much of it during the period he lived in Berlin with Diamant, who helped him burn the drafts. In his early years as a writer he was influenced by von Kleist, whose work he described in a letter to Bauer as frightening and whom he considered closer than his own family.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka drew and sketched extensively. Most of the drawings were lost or destroyed. Only about 40 of them were discovered.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka's earliest published works were eight stories which appeared in 1908 in the first issue of the literary journal "Hyperion" under the title ("Contemplation"). He wrote the story "" ("Description of a Struggle") in 1904; he showed it to Brod in 1905 who advised him to continue writing and convinced him to submit it to "Hyperion". Kafka published a fragment in 1908 and two sections in the spring of 1909, all in Munich.


title: Franz Kafka

text: In a creative outburst on the night of 22 September 1912, Kafka wrote the story "Das Urteil" ("The Judgment", literally: "The Verdict") and dedicated it to Felice Bauer. Brod noted the similarity in names of the main character and his fictional fiancée, Georg Bendemann and Frieda Brandenfeld, to Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer. The story is often considered Kafka's breakthrough work. It deals with the troubled relationship of a son and his dominant father, facing a new situation after the son's engagement. Kafka later described writing it as "a complete opening of body and soul", a story that "evolved as a true birth, covered with filth and slime". The story was first published in Leipzig in 1912 and dedicated "to Miss Felice Bauer", and in subsequent editions "for F."


title: Franz Kafka

text: In 1912, Kafka wrote "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis", or "The Transformation"), published in 1915 in Leipzig. The story begins with a travelling salesman waking to find himself transformed into an , a monstrous vermin, being a general term for unwanted and unclean pests, especially insects. Critics regard the work as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century. The story "In der Strafkolonie" ("In the Penal Colony"), dealing with an elaborate torture and execution device, was written in October 1914, revised in 1918, and published in Leipzig during October 1919. The story "Ein Hungerkünstler" ("A Hunger Artist"), published in the periodical in 1924, describes a victimized protagonist who experiences a decline in the appreciation of his strange craft of starving himself for extended periods. His last story, "Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse" ("Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"), also deals with the relationship between an artist and his audience.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka began his first novel in 1912; its first chapter is the story "Der Heizer" ("The Stoker"). He called the work, which remained unfinished, ("The Man Who Disappeared" or "The Missing Man"), but when Brod published it after Kafka's death he named it "Amerika". The inspiration for the novel was the time Kafka spent in the audience of Yiddish theatre the previous year, bringing him to a new awareness of his heritage, which led to the thought that an innate appreciation for one's heritage lives deep within each person. More explicitly humorous and slightly more realistic than most of Kafka's works, the novel shares the motif of an oppressive and intangible system putting the protagonist repeatedly in bizarre situations. It uses many details of experiences from his relatives who had emigrated to America and is the only work for which Kafka considered an optimistic ending.


title: Franz Kafka

text: In 1914 Kafka began the novel ("The Trial"), the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. He did not complete the novel, although he finished the final chapter. According to Nobel Prize winner and Kafka scholar Elias Canetti, Felice is central to the plot of "Der Process" and Kafka said it was "her story". Canetti titled his book on Kafka's letters to Felice "Kafka's Other Trial", in recognition of the relationship between the letters and the novel. Michiko Kakutani notes in a review for "The New York Times" that Kafka's letters have the "earmarks of his fiction: the same nervous attention to minute particulars; the same paranoid awareness of shifting balances of power; the same atmosphere of emotional suffocation—combined, surprisingly enough, with moments of boyish ardour and delight."


title: Franz Kafka

text: According to his diary, Kafka was already planning his novel ("The Castle"), by 11 June 1914; however, he did not begin writing it until 27 January 1922. The protagonist is the (land surveyor) named K., who struggles for unknown reasons to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle who govern the village. Kafka's intent was that the castle's authorities notify K. on his deathbed that his "legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was to be permitted to live and work there". Dark and at times surreal, the novel is focused on alienation, bureaucracy, the seemingly endless frustrations of man's attempts to stand against the system, and the futile and hopeless pursuit of an unattainable goal. Hartmut M. Rastalsky noted in his thesis: "Like dreams, his texts combine precise 'realistic' detail with absurdity, careful observation and reasoning on the part of the protagonists with inexplicable obliviousness and carelessness."


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka's stories were initially published in literary periodicals. His first eight were printed in 1908 in the first issue of the bi-monthly "Hyperion". Franz Blei published two dialogues in 1909 which became part of "Beschreibung eines Kampfes" ("Description of a Struggle"). A fragment of the story "Die Aeroplane in Brescia" ("The Aeroplanes at Brescia"), written on a trip to Italy with Brod, appeared in the daily "Bohemia" on 28 September 1909. On 27 March 1910, several stories that later became part of the book were published in the Easter edition of "Bohemia". In Leipzig during 1913, Brod and publisher Kurt Wolff included "" ("The Judgment. A Story by Franz Kafka.") in their literary yearbook for the art poetry "Arkadia". In the same year, Wolff published "Der Heizer" ("The Stoker") in the Jüngste Tag series, where it enjoyed three printings. The story "" ("Before the Law") was published in the 1915 New Year's edition of the independent Jewish weekly ; it was reprinted in 1919 as part of the story collection ("A Country Doctor") and became part of the novel . Other stories were published in various publications, including Martin Buber's "Der Jude", the paper , and the periodicals , "Genius", and "Prager Presse".


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka's first published book, ("Contemplation", or "Meditation"), was a collection of 18stories written between 1904 and 1912. On a summer trip to Weimar, Brod initiated a meeting between Kafka and Kurt Wolff; Wolff published in the at the end of 1912 (with the year given as 1913). Kafka dedicated it to Brod, "", and added in the personal copy given to his friend "" ("As it is already printed here, for my dearest Max").


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka's story "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis") was first printed in the October 1915 issue of , a monthly edition of expressionist literature, edited by René Schickele. Another story collection, ("A Country Doctor"), was published by Kurt Wolff in 1919, dedicated to Kafka's father. Kafka prepared a final collection of four stories for print, "(A Hunger Artist)", which appeared in 1924 after his death, in . On 20 April 1924, the published Kafka's essay on Adalbert Stifter.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka left his work, both published and unpublished, to his friend and literary executor Max Brod with explicit instructions that it should be destroyed on Kafka's death; Kafka wrote: "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread." Brod ignored this request and published the novels and collected works between 1925 and 1935. He took many papers, which remain unpublished, with him in suitcases to Palestine when he fled there in 1939. Kafka's last lover, Dora Diamant (later, Dymant-Lask), also ignored his wishes, secretly keeping 20notebooks and 35letters. These were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933, but scholars continue to search for them.


title: Franz Kafka

text: As Brod published the bulk of the writings in his possession, Kafka's work began to attract wider attention and critical acclaim. Brod found it difficult to arrange Kafka's notebooks in chronological order. One problem was that Kafka often began writing in different parts of the book; sometimes in the middle, sometimes working backwards from the end. Brod finished many of Kafka's incomplete works for publication. For example, Kafka left with unnumbered and incomplete chapters and with incomplete sentences and ambiguous content; Brod rearranged chapters, copy-edited the text, and changed the punctuation. appeared in 1925 in . Kurt Wolff published two other novels, in 1926 and "Amerika" in 1927. In 1931, Brod edited a collection of prose and unpublished stories as "(The Great Wall of China)", including the story of the same name. The book appeared in the . Brod's sets are usually called the "Definitive Editions".


title: Franz Kafka

text: In 1961 Malcolm Pasley acquired for the Oxford Bodleian Library most of Kafka's original handwritten works. The text for was later purchased through auction and is stored at the German Literary Archives in Marbach am Neckar, Germany. Subsequently, Pasley headed a team (including Gerhard Neumann, Jost Schillemeit and Jürgen Born) which reconstructed the German novels; republished them. Pasley was the editor for , published in 1982, and ("The Trial"), published in 1990. Jost Schillemeit was the editor of () published in 1983. These are called the "Critical Editions" or the "Fischer Editions".


title: Franz Kafka

text: When Brod died in 1968, he left Kafka's unpublished papers, which are believed to number in the thousands, to his secretary Esther Hoffe. She released or sold some, but left most to her daughters, Eva and Ruth, who also refused to release the papers. A court battle began in 2008 between the sisters and the National Library of Israel, which claimed these works became the property of the nation of Israel when Brod emigrated to British Palestine in 1939. Esther Hoffe sold the original manuscript of for US$2 million in 1988 to the German Literary Archive Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach am Neckar. A ruling by a Tel Aviv family court in 2010 held that the papers must be released and a few were, including a previously unknown story, but the legal battle continued. The Hoffes claim the papers are their personal property, while the National Library of Israel argues they are "cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people". The National Library also suggests that Brod bequeathed the papers to them in his will. The Tel Aviv Family Court ruled in October 2012, six months after Ruth's death, that the papers were the property of the National Library. The Israeli Supreme Court upheld the decision in December 2016.


title: Franz Kafka

text: The poet W. H. Auden called Kafka "the Dante of the twentieth century"; the novelist Vladimir Nabokov placed him among the greatest writers of the 20th century. Gabriel García Márquez noted the reading of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" showed him "that it was possible to write in a different way". A prominent theme of Kafka's work, first established in the short story "Das Urteil", is father–son conflict: the guilt induced in the son is resolved through suffering and atonement. Other prominent themes and archetypes include alienation, physical and psychological brutality, characters on a terrifying quest, and mystical transformation.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka's style has been compared to that of Kleist as early as 1916, in a review of "Die Verwandlung" and "Der Heizer" by Oscar Walzel in "Berliner Beiträge". The nature of Kafka's prose allows for varied interpretations and critics have placed his writing into a variety of literary schools. Marxists, for example, have sharply disagreed over how to interpret Kafka's works. Some accused him of distorting reality whereas others claimed he was critiquing capitalism. The hopelessness and absurdity common to his works are seen as emblematic of existentialism. Some of Kafka's books are influenced by the expressionist movement, though the majority of his literary output was associated with the experimental modernist genre. Kafka also touches on the theme of human conflict with bureaucracy. William Burrows claims that such work is centred on the concepts of struggle, pain, solitude, and the need for relationships. Others, such as Thomas Mann, see Kafka's work as allegorical: a quest, metaphysical in nature, for God.


title: Franz Kafka

text: According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the themes of alienation and persecution, although present in Kafka's work, have been overemphasised by critics. They argue Kafka's work is more deliberate and subversive—and more joyful—than may first appear. They point out that reading the Kafka work while focusing on the futility of his characters' struggles reveals Kafka's play of humour; he is not necessarily commenting on his own problems, but rather pointing out how people tend to invent problems. In his work, Kafka often created malevolent, absurd worlds. Kafka read drafts of his works to his friends, typically concentrating on his humorous prose. The writer Milan Kundera suggests that Kafka's surrealist humour may have been an inversion of Dostoyevsky's presentation of characters who are punished for a crime. In Kafka's work, a character is punished although a crime has not been committed. Kundera believes that Kafka's inspirations for his characteristic situations came both from growing up in a patriarchal family and living in a totalitarian state.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Attempts have been made to identify the influence of Kafka's legal background and the role of law in his fiction. Most interpretations identify aspects of law and legality as important in his work, in which the legal system is often oppressive. The law in Kafka's works, rather than being representative of any particular legal or political entity, is usually interpreted to represent a collection of anonymous, incomprehensible forces. These are hidden from the individual but control the lives of the people, who are innocent victims of systems beyond their control. Critics who support this absurdist interpretation cite instances where Kafka describes himself in conflict with an absurd universe, such as the following entry from his diary:


title: Franz Kafka

text: However, James Hawes argues many of Kafka's descriptions of the legal proceedings in —metaphysical, absurd, bewildering and nightmarish as they might appear—are based on accurate and informed descriptions of German and Austrian criminal proceedings of the time, which were inquisitorial rather than adversarial. Although he worked in insurance, as a trained lawyer Kafka was "keenly aware of the legal debates of his day". In an early 21st-century publication that uses Kafka's office writings as its point of departure, Pothik Ghosh states that with Kafka, law "has no meaning outside its fact of being a pure force of domination and determination".


title: Franz Kafka

text: The first instance of Kafka being translated into English was in 1925, when William A. Drake published "A Report for an Academy" in" The New York Herald Tribune". Eugene Jolas translated Kafka's "The Judgment" for the modernist journal "transition" in 1928. In 1930, Edwin and Willa Muir 1930 translated the first German edition of . This was published as "The Castle" by Secker & Warburg in England and Alfred A. Knopf in the United States. A 1941 edition, including a homage by Thomas Mann, spurred a surge in Kafka's popularity in the United States during the late 1940s. The Muirs translated all shorter works that Kafka had seen fit to print; they were published by Schocken Books in 1948 as "", including additionally "The First Long Train Journey", written by Kafka and Brod, Kafka's "A Novel about Youth", a review of Felix Sternheim's "Die Geschichte des jungen Oswald", his essay on Kleist's "Anecdotes", his review of the literary magazine "Hyperion", and an epilogue by Brod.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Later editions, notably those of 1954 ("Dearest Father. Stories and Other Writings"), included text, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, that had been deleted by earlier publishers. Known as "Definitive Editions", they include translations of "The Trial, Definitive", "The Castle, Definitive", and other writings. These translations are generally accepted to have a number of biases and are considered to be dated in interpretation. Published in 1961 by Schocken Books, "Parables and Paradoxes" presented in a bilingual edition by Nahum N. Glatzer selected writings, drawn from notebooks, diaries, letters, short fictional works and the novel "Der Process".


title: Franz Kafka

text: New translations were completed and published based on the recompiled German text of Pasley and Schillemeit"The Castle, Critical" by Mark Harman (Schocken Books, 1998), "The Trial, Critical" by Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998), and "Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared" by Michael Hofmann (New Directions Publishing, 2004).


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic particular to German, which permits long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—this being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is due to the construction of subordinate clauses in German, which require that the verb be at the end of the sentence. Such constructions are difficult to duplicate in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same (or at least equivalent) effect as the original text. German's more flexible word order and syntactical differences provide for multiple ways in which the same German writing can be translated into English. An example is the first sentence of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", which is crucial to the setting and understanding of the entire story:


title: Franz Kafka

text: The sentence above also exemplifies an instance of another difficult problem facing translators: dealing with the author's intentional use of ambiguous idioms and words that have several meanings, which results in phrasing that is difficult to translate precisely. English translators often render the word as 'insect'; in Middle German, however, literally means 'an animal unclean for sacrifice'; in today's German, it means 'vermin'. It is sometimes used colloquially to mean 'bug'—a very general term, unlike the scientific 'insect'. Kafka had no intention of labeling Gregor, the protagonist of the story, as any specific thing but instead wanted to convey Gregor's disgust at his transformation. Another example of this can be found in the final sentence of "Das Urteil" ("The Judgement"), with Kafka's use of the German noun . Literally, means 'intercourse' and, as in English, can have either a sexual or a non-sexual meaning. The word is additionally used to mean 'transport' or 'traffic', therefore the sentence can also be translated as: "At that moment an unending stream of traffic crossed over the bridge." The double meaning of "Verkehr" is given added weight by Kafka's confession to Brod that when he wrote that final line he was thinking of "a violent ejaculation."


title: Franz Kafka

text: Unlike many famous writers, Kafka is rarely quoted by others. Instead, he is noted more for his visions and perspective. Shimon Sandbank, a professor, literary critic, and writer, identifies Kafka as having influenced Jorge Luis Borges, Albert Camus, Eugène Ionesco, J. M. Coetzee and Jean-Paul Sartre. Kafka had a strong influence on Gabriel García Márquez and the novel "The Palace of Dreams" by Ismail Kadare. A "Financial Times" literary critic credits Kafka with influencing José Saramago, and Al Silverman, a writer and editor, states that J. D. Salinger loved to read Kafka's works.


title: Franz Kafka

text: The Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu said "Kafka is the author I love the most and who means, for me, the gate to literature"; he also described Kafka as "the saint of literature".


title: Franz Kafka

text: Kafka has been cited as an influence on the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, who paid homage to Kafka in his novel "Kafka on the Shore" with the namesake protagonist.


title: Franz Kafka

text: In 1999 a committee of 99 authors, scholars, and literary critics ranked and the second and ninth most significant German-language novels of the 20th century. Harold Bloom said "when he is most himself, Kafka gives us a continuous inventiveness and originality that rivals Dante and truly challenges Proust and Joyce as that of the dominant Western author of our century". Sandbank argues that despite Kafka's pervasiveness, his enigmatic style has yet to be emulated. Neil Christian Pages, a professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University who specialises in Kafka's works, says Kafka's influence transcends literature and literary scholarship; it impacts visual arts, music, and popular culture. Harry Steinhauer, a professor of German and Jewish literature, says that Kafka "has made a more powerful impact on literate society than any other writer of the twentieth century". Brod said that the 20th century will one day be known as the "century of Kafka".


title: Franz Kafka

text: Michel-André Bossy writes that Kafka created a rigidly inflexible and sterile bureaucratic universe. Kafka wrote in an aloof manner full of legal and scientific terms. Yet his serious universe also had insightful humour, all highlighting the "irrationality at the roots of a supposedly rational world". His characters are trapped, confused, full of guilt, frustrated, and lacking understanding of their surreal world. Much of the post-Kafka fiction, especially science fiction, follow the themes and precepts of Kafka's universe. This can be seen in the works of authors such as George Orwell and Ray Bradbury.


title: Franz Kafka

text: The following are examples of works across a range of dramatic, literary, and musical genres which demonstrate the extent of Kafka's cultural influence:


title: Franz Kafka

text: The term "Kafkaesque" is used to describe concepts and situations reminiscent of Kafka's work, particularly ("The Trial") and "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis"). Examples include instances in which bureaucracies overpower people, often in a surreal, nightmarish milieu that evokes feelings of senselessness, disorientation, and helplessness. Characters in a Kafkaesque setting often lack a clear course of action to escape a labyrinthine situation. Kafkaesque elements often appear in existential works, but the term has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Numerous films and television works have been described as Kafkaesque, and the style is particularly prominent in dystopian science fiction. Works in this genre that have been thus described include Patrick Bokanowski's film "The Angel" (1982), Terry Gilliam's film "Brazil" (1985), and Alex Proyas' science fiction film noir, "Dark City" (1998). Films from other genres which have been similarly described include Roman Polanski's "The Tenant" (1976) and the Coen brothers' "Barton Fink" (1991). The television series "The Prisoner" and "The Twilight Zone" are also frequently described as Kafkaesque.


title: Franz Kafka

text: However, with common usage, the term has become so ubiquitous that Kafka scholars note it is often misused. More accurately then, according to author Ben Marcus, paraphrased in "What it Means to be Kafkaesque" by Joe Fassler in "The Atlantic", "Kafka's quintessential qualities are affecting use of language, a setting that straddles fantasy and reality, and a sense of striving even in the face of bleakness—hopelessly and full of hope."


title: Franz Kafka

text: 3412 Kafka is an asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 6 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 10 January 1983 by American astronomers Randolph Kirk and Donald Rudy at Palomar Observatory in California, United States, and named after Kafka by them.


title: Franz Kafka

text: Apache Kafka, an open-source stream processing platform originally released in January 2011, is named after Kafka.


title: Franz Kafka

text: The Franz Kafka Museum in Prague is dedicated to Kafka and his work. A major component of the museum is an exhibit, "The City of K. Franz Kafka and Prague", which was first shown in Barcelona in 1999, moved to the Jewish Museum in New York City, and finally established in Prague in Malá Strana (Lesser Town), along the Moldau, in 2005. The Franz Kafka Museum calls its display of original photos and documents "Město K. Franz Kafka a Praha" ("City K. Kafka and Prague") and aims to immerse the visitor into the world in which Kafka lived and about which he wrote.


title: Franz Kafka

text: The Franz Kafka Prize, established in 2001, is an annual literary award of the Franz Kafka Society and the City of Prague. It recognizes the merits of literature as "humanistic character and contribution to cultural, national, language and religious tolerance, its existential, timeless character, its generally human validity, and its ability to hand over a testimony about our times". The selection committee and recipients come from all over the world, but are limited to living authors who have had at least one work published in Czech. The recipient receives $10,000, a diploma, and a bronze statuette at a presentation in Prague's Old Town Hall, on the Czech State Holiday in late October.


title: Franz Kafka

text: San Diego State University operates the Kafka Project, which began in 1998 as the official international search for Kafka's last writings.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. (November 25, 1960 – July 16, 1999), often referred to as John-John or JFK Jr., was an American lawyer, journalist, and magazine publisher. He was a son of the 35th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and a younger brother of Caroline Kennedy. Three days after his father was assassinated, he rendered a final salute during the funeral procession on his third birthday.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: From his childhood years at the White House, Kennedy was the subject of much media scrutiny, and later became a popular social figure in Manhattan. Trained as a lawyer, he worked as a New York City assistant district attorney for almost four years. In 1995, he launched "George" magazine, using his political and celebrity status to publicize it. He died in a plane crash in 1999 at the age of 38.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. was born on November 25, 1960, at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital two weeks after his father and namesake, Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy, was elected president. His father took office exactly eight weeks after John Jr. was born. His parents had a stillborn daughter named Arabella four years before John Jr.'s birth. John Jr. had an older sister, Caroline, and a younger brother, Patrick Bouvier (who died two days after his premature birth in 1963 of Respiratory Distress Syndrome.) His putative nickname, "John-John", came from a reporter who misheard JFK calling him "John" twice in quick succession; the name was not used by his family.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: John Jr. lived in the White House during the first three years of his life and remained in the public spotlight as a young adult. His father was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and the state funeral was held three days later, on John Jr.'s third birthday. In a moment that became a famous scene of his life, John Jr. stepped forward and rendered a final salute as his father's flag-draped casket was carried out from St. Matthew's Cathedral. NBC News vice-president Julian Goodman called the shot "the most impressive...shot in the history of television" which was setup by NBC Director Charles Jones who was working for the pool. Lyndon B. Johnson wrote his first letter as president to John-John and told him that he "can always be proud" of his father. Stan Stearns, who took the image, served as chief White House photographer during the LBJ White House years and over the years, showed Johnson the image of John-John saluting the casket, as the salute was a symbol of what Johnson said in his letter to him.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: The family continued with their plans for a birthday party to demonstrate that the Kennedys would go on despite the death of the president.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: After President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy moved her family, after brief residency in the Georgetown area of Washington, to a luxury apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, where Kennedy Jr. grew up. In 1967, his mother took him and Caroline on a six-week "sentimental journey" to Ireland, where they met President Éamon de Valera and visited the Kennedy ancestral home in Dunganstown.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: After Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, Jackie took Caroline and John Jr. out of the United States, saying: "If they're killing Kennedys, then my children are targets ... I want to get out of this country." The same year, she married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, and the family went to live on his private island of Skorpios. Kennedy is said to have considered his stepfather "a joke". When Onassis died in 1975, he left Kennedy $25,000, though Jacqueline was able to renegotiate the will, and acquired $20 million for herself and her children.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: In 1971, Kennedy returned to the White House with his mother and sister for the first time since the assassination. President Richard Nixon's daughters gave Kennedy a tour that included his old bedroom, and Nixon showed him the "Resolute" desk under which his father had let him play.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: Kennedy attended private schools in Manhattan, starting at Saint David's School and moving to Collegiate School, which he attended from third through tenth grade. He completed his education at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. After graduating, he accompanied his mother on a trip to Africa. He rescued his group while on a pioneering course, which had gotten lost for two days without food or water, and won points for leadership.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: In 1976, Kennedy and his cousin visited an earthquake disaster zone at Rabinal in Guatemala, helping with heavy building work and distributing food. The local priest said that they "ate what the people of Rabinal ate and dressed in Guatemalan clothes and slept in tents like most of the earthquake victims," adding that the two "did more for their country's image" in Guatemala "than a roomful of ambassadors." On his sixteenth birthday, Kennedy's Secret Service protection ended and he spent the summer of 1978 working as a wrangler in Wyoming. In 1979, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston was dedicated, and Kennedy made his first major speech, reciting Stephen Spender's poem "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great."


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: Kennedy attended Brown University, where he majored in American studies. There, he co-founded a student discussion group that focused on contemporary issues such as apartheid in South Africa, gun control, and civil rights. Visiting South Africa during a summer break, he was appalled by apartheid, and arranged for U.N. ambassador Andrew Young to speak about the topic at Brown. By his junior year at Brown, he had moved off campus to live with several other students in a shared house, and spent time at Xenon, a club owned by Howard Stein. Kennedy was initiated into Phi Psi, a local social fraternity that had been the Rhode Island Alpha Chapter of national Phi Kappa Psi fraternity until 1978.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: In January 1983, Kennedy's Massachusetts driver's license was suspended after he received more than three speeding summonses in a twelve-month period, and failed to appear at a hearing. The family's lawyer explained he most likely "became immersed in exams and just forgot the date of the hearing." He graduated that same year with a bachelor's degree in American studies, and then took a break, traveling to India and spending some time at the University of Delhi where he did his post graduation work and he met Mother Teresa. He also worked with some of the Kennedy special interest projects, including the East Harlem School at Exodus House and Reaching Up.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: After the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco, Kennedy returned to New York and earned $20,000 a year in a position at the Office of Business Development, where his boss reflected that he worked "in the same crummy cubbyhole as everybody else. I heaped on the work and was always pleased." He continued there as deputy director of the 42nd Street Development Corporation in 1986, conducting negotiations with developers and city agencies. In 1988, he became a summer associate at Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg & Phillips, a Los Angeles law firm with strong connections to the Democratic Party. There, Kennedy worked for Charlie Manatt, his uncle Ted Kennedy's law school roommate.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: From 1989, Kennedy headed Reaching Up, a nonprofit group which provided educational and other opportunities for workers who helped people with disabilities. William Ebenstein, executive director of Reaching Up, said, "He was always concerned with the working poor, and his family always had an interest in helping them."


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: In 1989, Kennedy earned a J.D. degree from the New York University School of Law. He then failed the New York bar exam twice, before passing on his third try in July 1990. After failing the exam for a second time, Kennedy vowed that he would take it continuously until he was ninety-five years old or passed. If he had failed a third time, he would have been ineligible to serve as a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, where he worked for the next four years. On August 29, 1991, Kennedy won his first case as a prosecutor.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: In the summer of 1992, he worked as a journalist and was commissioned by "The New York Times" to write an article about his kayaking expedition to the Åland Archipelago, where he saved one of his friends from the water when his kayak capsized. He then considered creating a magazine with his friend, public-relations magnate Michael J. Berman—a plan which his mother thought too risky. In his 2000 book "The Day John Died", Christopher Andersen wrote that Jacqueline had also worried that her son would die in a plane crash, and asked her longtime companion Maurice Tempelsman "to do whatever it took to keep John from becoming a pilot".


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: Meanwhile, Kennedy had done a bit of acting, which was one of his passions (he had appeared in many plays while at Brown). He expressed interest in acting as a career, but his mother strongly disapproved of it, considering it an unsuitable profession. On August 4, 1985, Kennedy made his New York acting debut in front of an invitation-only audience at the Irish Theater on Manhattan's West Side. Executive director of the Irish Arts Center, Nye Heron, said that Kennedy was "one of the best young actors I've seen in years". Kennedy's director, Robin Saex, stated, "He has an earnestness that just shines through." Kennedy's largest acting role was playing a fictionalized version of himself in the eighth-season episode of the sitcom "Murphy Brown", called "Altered States". In this episode, Kennedy visits Brown at her office, in order to promote a magazine he is publishing.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: In 1995, Kennedy and Michael Berman founded "George", a glossy, politics-as-lifestyle and fashion monthly, with Kennedy controlling 50 percent of the shares. Kennedy officially launched the magazine at a news conference in Manhattan on September 8, and joked that he had not seen so many reporters in one place since he failed his first bar exam.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: Each issue of the magazine contained an editor's column and interviews written by Kennedy, who believed they could make politics "accessible by covering it in an entertaining and compelling way" which would allow "popular interest and involvement" to follow. Kennedy did interviews with Louis Farrakhan, Billy Graham, Garth Brooks, and others.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: The first issue was criticized for its image of Cindy Crawford posing as George Washington in a powdered wig and ruffled shirt. In defense of the cover, Kennedy stated that "political magazines should look like "Mirabella"."


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: In July 1997, "Vanity Fair" had published a profile of New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, claiming that the mayor was sleeping with his press secretary (which both parties denied). Although tempted to follow up on this story, Kennedy decided against it.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: The same month, Kennedy wrote about meeting Mother Teresa, declaring that the "three days I spent in her presence was the strongest evidence this struggling Catholic has ever had that God exists."


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: The September 1997 issue of "George" centered on temptation, and featured two of Kennedy's cousins, Michael LeMoyne Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy II. Michael had been accused of having an affair with his children's underaged babysitter, while Joe had been accused by his ex-wife of having bullied her. John declared that both his cousins had become "poster boys for bad behavior"—believed to be the first time a member of the Kennedy family had publicly attacked another Kennedy. He said he was trying to show that press coverage of the pair was unfair, due to them being Kennedys. But Joe paraphrased John's father by stating, "Ask not what you can do for your cousin, but what you can do for his magazine."


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: By early 1997, Kennedy and Berman found themselves locked in a power struggle, which led to screaming matches, slammed doors, and even one physical altercation. Eventually Berman sold his share of the company, and Kennedy took on Berman's responsibilities himself. Though the magazine had already begun to decline in popularity before Berman left, his departure was followed by a rapid drop in sales.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: David Pecker, CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Magazines who were partners in "George", said the decline was because Kennedy refused to "take risks as an editor, despite the fact that he was an extraordinary risk taker in other areas of his life." Pecker said, "He understood that the target audience for "George" was the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old demographic, yet he would routinely turn down interviews that would appeal to this age group, like Princess Diana or John Gotti Jr., to interview subjects like Dan Rostenkowski or Võ Nguyên Giáp."


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: Shortly before his death, Kennedy had been planning a series of online chats with the 2000 presidential candidates. Microsoft was to provide the technology and pay for it while receiving advertising in "George". After his death, the magazine was bought out by Hachette, but folded in early 2001.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: Kennedy addressed the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, introducing his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy. He invoked his father's inaugural address, calling "a generation to public service", and received a two-minute standing ovation. Republican consultant Richard Viguerie said he did not remember a word of the speech, but remembered "a good delivery" and added, "I think it was a plus for the Democrats and the boy. He is strikingly handsome."


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: Kennedy participated in his cousin Patrick J. Kennedy's campaign for a seat in the Rhode Island House of Representatives by visiting the district. He sat outside the polling booth and had his picture taken with "would-be" voters. The polaroid ploy worked so well in the campaign that Patrick J. Kennedy used it again in 1994.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: Kennedy also campaigned in Boston for his uncle's re-election to the U.S. Senate against challenger Mitt Romney in 1994. "He always created a stir when he arrived in Massachusetts," remarked Senator Kennedy.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: While attending Brown University, Kennedy met Sally Munro, whom he dated for six years, and they visited India in 1983. While he was a student at Brown, he also met socialite Brooke Shields, with whom he was later linked.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: Kennedy also dated models Cindy Crawford and Julie Baker, as well as entertainer Sarah Jessica Parker, who said she enjoyed dating Kennedy but realized he "was a public domain kind of a guy." Parker claimed to have no idea what "real fame" was until dating Kennedy and felt that she should "apologize for dating him" since it became the "defining factor in the person" she was.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: Kennedy had known actress Daryl Hannah since their two families had vacationed together in St. Maarten in the early '80s. After meeting again at the wedding of his aunt Lee Radziwill in 1988, they dated for five and a half years, though their relationship was complicated by her feelings for singer Jackson Browne, with whom she had lived for a time.


title: John F. Kennedy Jr.

text: Also during this time, Kennedy dated Christina Haag. They had known each other as children, and she also attended Brown University.