Stanley Corngold was born in Brooklyn in 1934 and studied at Columbia, then at Cornell, where Paul de Man was among the advisers on his doctoral work. He joined Princeton in 1966, became a full professor in 1981 and retired in 2009 as professor of German and comparative literature. He has written on Nietzsche, Musil, Mann and Benjamin, and has translated Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther. Franz Kafka is the center of his career.
His Kafka work combines close reading with attention to how Kafka actually lived and worked. Kafka held a post at a workers' accident insurance institute, and Corngold, with Benno Wagner and Jack Greenberg, edited and translated the reports and legal documents he wrote there. With Wagner he also wrote Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine (2011). A single question runs through much of this work: how does a writer's language turn into the events of his fiction?
He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. With Michael Jennings he founded the Princeton Kafka Network, active from 2009 to 2012.
For a first read, pick up his translation of The Metamorphosis. The Norton Critical Edition is annotated and based on the definitive German text, with selected textual variants, and a Modern Library edition also collects his translation. Read the story first, then the apparatus. If you want Corngold arguing in his own voice, move on to Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, a book on Kafka's writing published by Princeton University Press.
