SOURCE: Auster, Paul. “The Art of Hunger.” In The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews and The Red Notebook, pp. 9-20. New York: Penguin, 1992.

In the following essay, Auster offers a thematic analysis of Hunger, characterizing the work as a pioneering text about artistic achievement.

What is important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger.

—Antonin Artaud

A young man comes to a city. He has no name, no home, no work: he has come to the city to write. He writes. Or, more exactly, he does not write. He starves to the point of death.

The city is Christiania (Oslo); the year is 1890. The young man wanders through the streets: the city is a...