You're being unfair to Kafka here by reducing literary accomplishment to mere quantity. Yes, his works were all short, but all of them far surpass the majority

You're being unfair to Kafka here by reducing literary accomplishment to mere quantity. Yes, his works were all short, but all of them far surpass the majority of "novels" pumped out daily by the modern publishing industry and all its hacks, idiots who compose at a 6th grade level, for the indisputably puerile audiences they pander to. The metamorphosis is apparently 20k words or so, and hell, it could be less. But those are 20k words of tight, well crafted prose and artistic execution. Far better than the 50-100k plus words of complete and utter doggerel the majority of us consume on a daily basis. This is another issue of capitalism--reduction of human experience to mere quantity. You begin to ignore quality and humanity fades. You become content consuming the most infantile garbage so long as the industry keeps it flowing, so long as the magnitude of crap is great and undisrupted. Few are those possessing the willingness or mental fortitude to devote a few hours to care about humanity and its progression, we'd rather spend our hours playing video games or watching movies or tv to "relax" or "unwind"; surprise, surprise, this constant availability of mindless entertainment is another one of capitalism's traps designed to keep you content with a life unlived. I realize I sort of got off topic from what you stated about Kafka, and none of this is aimed at you specifically boomboomsubban, you just got me on a roooolllll. I understand your point about Kafka was probably more so that he could've produced more as a writer had his situation been different, not that what he didn't manage to produce wasn't necessarily good, but we don't know that -- we can't argue counterfactuals. It may well have been the case that Kafka simply spent more time on a given piece than most authors, and thus even had he more time to write his output may not have increased too significantly.