The story describes the bizarre wanderings of sixteen-year-old European immigrant Karl Roßmann (Rossmann), who was forced to go to New York City to escape the scandal of getting a housemaid pregnant.

They promise to find him a job, but they sell his suit without permission, eat his food in front of him without offering him any, and ransack his belongings.

In conversations Kafka used to refer to this book as his "American novel", later he called it simply The Stoker, after the title of the first chapter, which appeared separately in 1913.

[6] The title Amerika was chosen by Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, who assembled the uncompleted manuscript and published it after his death.

In enigmatic language, Kafka used to hint smilingly that within this "almost limitless" theatre his young hero was going to find again a profession, a stand-by, his freedom, even his old home and his parents, as if by some celestial witchery.

[8] The novel is more explicitly humorous but slightly more realistic (except in the last chapter) than most of Kafka's works, but it shares the same motifs of an oppressive and intangible system putting the protagonist repeatedly in bizarre situations.

Specifically, within Amerika, a scorned individual often must plead his innocence in front of remote and mysterious figures of authority.

Although he always had a longing for free space and distant lands, it is said that he never travelled farther than France and Upper Italy.

"[12] Film and television Theatre Other The New York performance group Nature Theater of Oklahoma named themselves after the one in Kafka's novel.

[17] German artist Martin Kippenberger attempted to complete the story in his installation The Happy Ending of Franz Kafka's "Amerika".