Kafka drafted the opening sentence of The Trial in August 1914, and continued work on the novel throughout 1915. 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. His friend Max Brod, knowing Kafka's habit of destroying his own work, eventually took the manuscript into safekeeping. This manuscript consisted of 161 loose pages torn from notebooks, which Kafka had bundled together into chapters. The order of the chapters was not made clear to Brod, nor was he told which parts were complete and which unfinished. Following Kafka's death in 1924, Brod edited the work and assembled it into a novel to the best of his ability. Further editorial work has been done by later scholars, but Kafka's final vision for The Trial remains unknown.[3]
