America (novel)

America (German: Amerika) was a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1927, which describes the adventures of a sixteen-year-old European emigrant called Karl Grossman in the United States, as a punishment for being seduced by a maid, to meet his uncle who receives him at his home and initiates him in business management.

Fired by his uncle and without any money in a strange world, he finds a job as an elevator operator working at the huge Hotel Occidental.

The novel presents the drama of a European who found himself to be just a worthless part of the machine-like American corporation system, debunking the whole American success myth.