Short answers, pulled from the story.
Kafka drafted the opening sentence of The Trial in August 1914 and worked on it throughout 1915. It was published posthumously on the 26th of April 1925 by Verlag Die Schmiede in Berlin, after Kafka's death in 1924.
Kafka never completed or authorized the publication of The Trial. His friend and literary executor Max Brod rescued the manuscript, which consisted of 161 loose pages torn from notebooks, and edited it into a novel after Kafka died in 1924.
On the eve of Josef K.'s thirty-first birthday, two men escort him to a small quarry outside the city and kill him, stabbing him through the heart with a butcher's knife while strangling him. His last words are "Like a dog!"
"Before the Law" is a parable a cathedral priest tells Josef K. near the end of the novel. It describes a man from the country who spends his entire life waiting to pass through a door made only for him but is never admitted. Kafka had published the fable separately before it appeared as part of the novel.
Willa and Edwin Muir produced the first English-language translation of The Trial, published in 1937 by Victor Gollancz Ltd. At least seven other translators have since produced their own English versions.
Orson Welles directed a 1962 film adaptation with Anthony Perkins as Josef K., playing the advocate himself. A 1993 film directed by David Jones, based on Harold Pinter's screenplay, starred Kyle MacLachlan as Josef K. and Anthony Hopkins as the Priest.