A Hunger Artist

A Hunger Artist is a short story by the German-language writer Franz Kafka, published in 1922 under the title Ein Hungerkuenstler, first appearing in the magazine Die neue Rundschau and later collected in the volume of the same name, the last book Kafka prepared for publication before his death. The story follows a professional faster who once drew large paying audiences to watch him abstain from food for days at a stretch inside a public cage, but whose art and public appeal steadily decline as tastes change, leaving him abandoned and forgotten even as, in his final words, he insists his fasting was never a virtue but simply the result of never finding a food he liked. Widely read as an allegory of the misunderstood or self-destructive artist, and sometimes as an oblique commentary on Kafka's own relationship to his writing, the story is considered one of Kafka's most fully realized short works and a central text in the study of literary modernism's treatment of art, isolation and public indifference.