America (novel)

Amerika (German: Amerika) was a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1927, which describes the adventures of a sixteen-year-old European emigrant called Karl Grossman in the United States, as a punishment for being seduced by a maid, to meet his uncle who receives him at his home and initiates him in business management.

Fired by his uncle and without any money in a strange world, he finds a job as an elevator operator working at the huge Hotel Occidental.

The novel is more humorous than most of Kafka's work, but it has the same themes of an oppressive unfair system putting the protagonist repeatedly in situations that are just plain not fair.