Hunger artists of more than a century ago, immortalized by Franz Kafka, were athletes and businessmen, not saints. They starved themselves before the public for a sum. Fasting girls almost always had religious underpinnings, but their male counterparts made no bones about making money. Giovanni Succi was likely Kafka’s direct inspiration, but Dr. Henry S. Tanner’s purported forty-day fast in NYC in 1880 may have been singular in the attention it received. A report on the end of the event was published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.