Letter to My Father — Franz Kafka

Conflict between father and son is one of the oldest themes in literature, and in this open letter to his father -- a letter that was never sent -- Kafka tries to come to terms with one of the most deeply rooted obsessions of his troubled soul. Written as a long, tense, and dramatic confession in which writer and man are gathered together in front of an ambivalent figure of authority, Letter to My Father is a desperate attempt to retrace the origins of a turbulent and highly conflicted relationship between an unflinching parent and an extremely sensitive child. Kafka's inspired work is both a merciless indictment of his father and an impassioned appeal to him.