Reminiscing about the glamorous poverty of interwar Paris, Ernest Hemingway remembers looking at Cézanne's artworks on an empty stomach:

For Hemingway, the aesthetic begins, not with Cézanne's paintings, but with the author's own hunger. Elevating this state to the precondition of a special kind of aesthetic experience, Hemingway implies that it structures both his own aesthetic receptivity and Cézanne's creativity—that it constitutes the hidden structure of his landscapes and the shared substratum of the aesthetic experience that holds Hemingway and Cézanne in a provisional kind of relation. In this sense, hunger establishes a kind of sociality among modernist artists, joined together in their shared merging of aesthetic experience and physical starvation. In this central text of the modernist period’s self-mythologization, Hemingway offers us starvation as both a social fact and an aesthetic principle. He gives us a starving artist who, by starving, not only makes art new but joins a society of artists for whom hunger is the aesthetic state par excellence.

Hemingway's account of hunger's role in aesthetic experience animates whole swathes of modernism. Arthur Rimbaud's sonorous, “Ma faim, Anne, Anne,” which opens his 1872 poem “Fêtes de la faim” (Feasts of hunger), perhaps inaugurates this tradition, but the image—if not the rhyme—resonates through the period. For Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, it was the foundation of his first semi-autobiographical novel. For Kafka, it provided one of his most potent metaphors of artisthood in his 1922 short story, “A Hunger Artist.” The trope was taken up by many of their successors, both in their fiction and in their memoirs. Henry Miller's scandalous self-portraits merge sexual excess with gustatory deprivation and aesthetic revelries, and with Hemingway's own work, help to make the starving artist the central protagonist of “lost generation” self-mythologization.