Kafka left behind explicit instructions in the event of his death: every piece of writing is "to be burned unread". We can only imagine what the landscape of literature would look like today had they followed his request. He is now regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth and twenty-first century, inspiring the likes of W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Albert Camus, J. M. Coetzee, José Saramago, J. D. Salinger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. It is rumoured that Kafka's lover also ignored his request, and secretly kept twenty notebooks and thirty-five letters. Scholars continue to search for them.
