ÄŒapek was a noted novelist, playwright, and essayist. He was perhaps the best-known Czech literary figure of the 1920s and 1930s.

Born in northeastern Bohemia on Jan. 9, 1890, Karel ÄŒapek was the son of a physician. He studied philosophy at the Czech University of Prague, where he was influenced in his thinking by Henri Bergson and by modern American philosophy. In 1914 he earned a doctorate. He remained, except for numerous travels abroad, in Prague until the end of his life. In 1935 he married the well-known actress Olga Scheinpflugova.

The Czech author Karel Čapek's first creative phase (1908-1921) was marked by close collaboration with his brother, Joseph, who later became a distinguished painter. This period in his writing career culminated in two collections of short stories. The central motif of Wayside Crosses (1917) is the mechanism of modern civilization—"Everything that we touch becomes a tool. Even man." The second collection, Painful Stories (1921; Eng. trans. Money and Other Stories), deals with middle-class life. It is no accident that the decisive role in almost all the stories is played by money. The characters in these books are, for the most part, helpless victims of forces that have overwhelmed them.

In his second phase (1921-1932) ÄŒapek emerged as a dramatist, novelist, journalist, and writer of travel sketches. Some of his comedies as well as his novels from this period are utopian. Best known, especially to American theatergoers, is his visionary play R. U. R. (1920), a sharp criticism of capitalism which introduced the word "robot" into the English language. Another comedy of this period, portraying the postwar situation in the world, is the ballet or revue From the Insect World (1921), written in collaboration with his brother and translated into English as The World We Live In.

During this period ÄŒapek also became prominent as an essayist