One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.

[1] Like Kafka's two other novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter that appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending.

After Kafka's death in 1924, his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede.

This was an unusually productive period for Kafka, despite the outbreak of World War I, which significantly increased the pressures of his day job as an insurance agent.

[3] Having begun by writing the opening and concluding sections of the novel, Kafka worked on the intervening scenes in a haphazard manner, using several different notebooks simultaneously.

[3] On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Josef K., the chief clerk of a bank, is unexpectedly arrested by two agents from an unidentified agency for an unspecified crime.

After a period of exploration he finds the court in the attic of a dilapidated working-class tenement block, at the back of a young washerwoman's home.

The washerwoman gives him information about the process and attempts to seduce him before a law student, the man who assaulted her the previous week, takes her away, claiming her to be his mistress.

Suspicious of the advocate's motives and the apparent lack of progress, Josef finally decides to dismiss Huld and take control of matters himself.

Upon arriving at Huld's office, he meets a downtrodden merchant, Rudi Block, who offers Josef some insight from a fellow defendant's perspective.

Block's case has continued for five years and he has gone from being a successful businessman to being almost bankrupt and is virtually enslaved by his dependence on the lawyer and Leni, with whom he appears to be sexually involved.