Ernst Pawel(1920-1994) , a novelist and biographer, died on Tuesday at his home in Great Neck, L.I. He was 74.

The cause was lung cancer, his family said.

Mr. Pawel's 1984 biography of Franz Kafka, "The Nightmare of Reason," won several prizes, including the Alfred Harcourt Award in biography and memoirs, and was translated into 10 languages. In a review for The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called the work "moving and perceptive."

Mr. Pawel was also the author of "The Labyrinth of Exile," a biography of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. He had recently finished a book about the German poet Heinrich Heine and at the time of his death was working on his own memoirs, "Life in the Dark Ages." Both books are to be published posthumously, his family said.

He was born in 1920 in Breslau, then under German rule but now part of Poland, and fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1933, settling first in Yugoslavia and four years later immigrating to New York City. After serving as a translator for Army intelligence during World War II, he received a bachelor's degree from the City University of New York.

He was the author of three novels, "The Island of Time" (1950), "The Dark Tower" (1957) and "In the Absence of Magic" (1961), and numerous essays and book reviews. Fluent in a dozen languages, he worked for 36 years as a translator and public relations executive for New York Life Insurance. He retired in 1982.

He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Ruth; a son, Michael, and a daughter, Miriam, both of Manhattan, and a granddaughter.

A comprehensive and interpretative biography of Franz Kafka that is both a monumental work of scholarship and a vivid, lively evocation of Kafka's world.