Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, of tuberculosis, in a sanatorium outside Vienna. He was 40. He left three unfinished novels, a substantial body of shorter fiction, letters, and diaries, and a note to his friend Max Brod instructing him to burn all of it — “everything I leave behind me… in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread.