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.

The mythology of the Lost Generation in 1920s Paris has been so thoroughly processed into glamour that the actual conditions of the period have become nearly unrecognizable inside it: a city still rebuilding after the war, full of American expatriates living cheaply on the dollar-franc exchange rate, several of them drinking themselves toward early death, most of them producing work of lasting importance under circumstances that were genuinely precarious and not always recognizably fun.

In June 1816, Mary Godwin was eighteen years old and living in a rented villa on the shores of Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Byron’s physician John Polidori, and Byron’s companion Claire Clairmont. The weather was catastrophically bad — cold, dark, and rainy throughout a summer that should have been Mediterranean. They were indoors most of the time, reading German ghost stories aloud and eventually agreeing on a competition: each of them would write a supernatural tale.

In December 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky was led into Semyonovsky Square in St. Petersburg, bound to a post with two other condemned men, and prepared for execution by firing squad. He was 28. He had been convicted of involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of liberal intellectuals who had read and discussed banned texts, and the sentence was death. He had been in the Peter and Paul Fortress for eight months.