What did Max Brod do besides refuse to burn Kafka's papers?

Plenty. Max Brod is best remembered as the friend who refused Franz Kafka's instruction to burn his unpublished work and published it instead, but that came at the end of a friendship that began in 1902. Through those years Brod kept reassuring Kafka, who chronically doubted his own talent, and pushed him to publish. He was also a prolific writer in his own right and a champion of other artists.

The two met on 23 October 1902 as students at Charles University, after Brod gave a lecture on Arthur Schopenhauer. From then on they met constantly, often daily, becoming so close that Brod, Kafka and their mutual friend Felix Weltsch were known as the 'close Prague circle'. During Kafka's lifetime, Brod repeatedly tried to reassure him of his writing talent, which Kafka chronically doubted, pushed him to publish, and is probably the reason Kafka started keeping a diary at all. In 1912 the two even managed to publish one chapter of an attempted joint travelogue, with Kafka writing the introduction.

Brod was not merely Kafka's cheerleader; he was a literary force in his own right. Unlike Kafka, he published rapidly and widely, eventually putting out 83 titles, and his first novel, published in 1908 when he was 24, was hailed in Berlin as a masterpiece of expressionism. His critical backing helped make Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk a success, and he played a key role in spreading the operas of composer Leoš Janáček.

In 1939, as the Nazis took over Prague, Brod and his wife fled to Mandatory Palestine. He settled in Tel Aviv and worked for 30 years as a dramaturg for Habimah, later Israel's national theatre. In 1961, at the request of Kafka's heirs, about two-thirds of Kafka's papers were given to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.