Kafka was fond of reading travel books and memoirs. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was one of his favorite books, from which he liked reading passages aloud. 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.[10] Despite this, a rare photo shows Kafka with an unidentified man at Marielyst beach in Denmark.[11]
Kafka, at the time, was also reading, or rereading, several novels by Charles Dickens and wrote in his diary: "My intention was, as I now see, to write a Dickens novel, enriched by the sharper lights which I took from our modern times, and by the pallid ones I would have found in my own interior."[12]
