Franz Kafka’s handsome face, with its patrician cheekbones, tremendous dark eyes and vaguely ironic expression, has become a visual representation of angst, more understated but no less powerful than Munch’s “Scream”. We have come to think of the man behind the “-esque” as a soul in perpetual conflict with the absurdities of modern life, its spiritual dislocations and irreconcilable contradictions.

But a sparkling exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York, marking the centenary of his death in 1924, proves that there was more to Kafka than despair. Far from being an isolate who nursed his anguish in solitude, he was a social being with a job, a family and an ample circle of co-workers, friends and lovers.

The Morgan lays out both the truth and the ways in which posterity tweaked it to make him conform to the lonely antiheroes of his books. As a young man, Kafka posed in a suit and a bowler hat with a companion, the grinning barmaid Juliane Szokoll, and a German shepherd. Later, a French publisher excised the woman from the photo and left in the blurred dog, so that readers would focus on the author’s melancholy eyes. (Given the choice, Kafka might have cropped himself out, too: “All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog,” he wrote.)