Franz Kafka 
The Trial 

The Trial  (original German title: 
Der Process, later 
Der Prozess,  
Der Proceß and 
Der Prozeß) is a novel written by Franz Kafka from 1914 to 1915 and published in 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells 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. Heavily influenced by Dostoyevsky’s 
Crime and Punishment and 
The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoyevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka’s other novels,  
The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter which brings the story to an end.