Dearest Father by 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.