The Owners of the Keys followed his early work in poetry resulting in such collections as Man: A Broad Garden, The Last May, and Monology.  
Like Henry James he wrote on the "art of the novel," though his version didn't appear in English until 1988.  His one-act play The Owners of the Keys followed his early work in poetry resulting in such collections as Man: A Broad Garden, The Last May, and Monology.  His second novel, Life is Elsewhere, preceded his 1985 Jerusalem Prize for Literature for novels like The Joke and The Farewell Party.  FTP, name this Czech author of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Like Henry James he wrote on the "art of the novel," though his version didn't appear in English until 1988.  
Milan Kundera