Writers and their coffee

...how writers from Balzac to Murakami used coffee as a motif

“I’d rather take coffee than compliments just now.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Coffee is one of the world’s most beloved drinks, and one of its most traded goods. Yet its journey to our tables was not simple. Coffee’s place in society has always been shaped as much by its emotional and symbolic power as by its chemical pull. Born in Africa, carried through Arabia, East Asia, and Latin America, coffee has traveled the globe like a restless pilgrim, weaving itself into the rituals, identities, and kitchens of countless cultures. Even today, it blooms almost everywhere but Antarctica, whispering different meanings in different lands.

Unlike the silent onlookers of history — like Zelig or Forrest Gump — coffee has never been just a backdrop. It has been an actor in its own right, riding human hands and hopes across oceans and empires. As Michael Pollan suggests, perhaps it was coffee, with its sweet flowers and potent seeds, that truly chose us. Today, coffee is both a ritual and a necessity, a symbol of intellectualism and loneliness, of comfort and restlessness.

Writers and coffee: it is a bond as old and deep as any love affair. Not merely fuel for sleepless nights, coffee has seeped into literature itself — a motif of ambition, memory, ritual, and solitude. From Balzac’s fevered devotion to Murakami’s quiet cups, coffee has mirrored the emotional landscapes of those who write and those they create. It seemed only fitting, then, to delve into the lives of those who, to borrow rather literally from T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, “measure out their lives with coffee spoons.”

balzac: coffee as obsession

“The paper covers itself in ink, because the evening begins and ends with torrents of black water, as the battle does with its black powder.”

— Honoré de Balzac, Treatise on Modern Stimulants

Before the New Journalists of the ’60s, before today’s polished narrative nonfiction stylists, there was a frenzied Frenchman with a pen in one hand and a bottomless cup of coffee in the other. Honoré de Balzac, gulping down up to 50 cups of jet-black brew a day, wrote like a man possessed. His life’s work, La Comédie Humaine, was an obsessive attempt to map the sprawl of post-Napoleonic French society through the lens of realism.

Balzac’s love for coffee wasn’t casual — it bordered on the fanatical. In his Treatise on Modern Stimulants, an appendix to Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût, he analyzed five common stimulants — coffee, tea, sugar, alcohol, and tobacco — but it was coffee that got the most impassioned treatment. When taken on an empty stomach, he wrote, it set his solar plexus on fire, sending sparks shooting up to his brain. What followed was a literary war zone: ideas marching like battalions, memories charging with flags, logic crashing in like artillery. Characters sprang to life, wit sniped from the sidelines, all ignited by the gunpowder that was coffee.

“…milled coffee, crushed, cold and anhydrous (a chemical word that means little or no water) taken on an empty stomach. The coffee falls into your stomach … attacks the delicate and velvety lining … From then on, everything becomes agitated: ideas march like the battalions of a great army. Memories charge in, flags flying: the high cavalry of logic rushes in … witticisms appear like snipers; characters rise up; the paper covers itself in ink, because the evening begins and ends with torrents of black water, as the battle does with gunpowder.”

Of course, the come-down was rough. Balzac was irritable, sharp-edged, almost unbearable without his fix. “Coffee,” he once said ominously, “wanted a victim.” And in the end, it got one. His output was staggering — 91 completed works, 46 more unfinished. But the sheer volume of caffeine that powered him also burned him out. By 1850, at the age of 51, his overworked heart gave out. The coffee had written him into history and written him off.

proust: coffee and memory

The goddess Mnemotechne leans out from heaven and offers us, in the form of ‘habit of calling for coffee,’ the hope of resurrection.

— Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière

If Balzac’s coffee was a stimulant for action, Proust’s was an invitation to reflection. In In Search of Lost Time, coffee lingers beside the madeleine, its bitterness deepening the sweetness of nostalgia. For Proust, coffee was a vessel of involuntary memory, an everyday thing that suddenly opens a hidden door to the past. It was not the rush of caffeine he sought, but the hush of remembrance.

A sip, a scent, a swirl of steam — and suddenly, the past rose up unbidden. Memory, for him, didn’t need summoning. It arrived when it pleased, tucked inside the most ordinary sensations.

“The taste was the taste of the little piece of madeleine my aunt Léonie would give me”

Proust drank only CORCELLET — the Parisian gold standard of coffee for over two centuries, from its founding in 1760 to its quiet demise in 1968. His blend of choice was the Mélange Opéra, France’s oldest coffee blend. And he liked it strong. Intensely brewed, drop by drop, until it yielded the thickest, boldest essence possible. This wasn’t just a preference. It was ritual. It was fuel not for speed, but for slowness — for stillness. For writing that would redefine French literature.

Coffee, for Proust, was a portal. A daily return to the sensory world — to weather, to childhood, to light filtering through a half-open curtain.

The taste of out morning café au lait brings with it the vague hope of good weather which so often, long ago, while we were drinking it out of a creamy-white, rippled porcelain bowl which might almost have been made out of hardened milk, when the day was still intact and full, made us smile at the sheer uncertainty of the early light.

For Proust, coffee didn’t propel him forward. It brought him back.

hemingway: coffee and ritual

“Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.”

— Ernest Hemingway

If Proust’s coffee summoned the past, Hemingway’s grounded him in the present. For him, it wasn’t a stimulant so much as a ceremony — something warm to hold between the fingers in a world full of war, heartbreak, and noise. In Hemingway’s world, coffee punctuated the narrative: between battles, between women, between long, uncertain silences. It was his tether in the spaces where meaning slipped through.

In the cafés of Paris, Hemingway found more than caffeine — he found clarity. He sat for hours at La Rotonde or Café de Flore, reading, watching, listening. These weren’t just cafés, but crucibles of conversation and solitude. The coffee was strong, yes, but the light mattered more. A place full of light, he called it — and he meant it in every sense. These cafés weren’t just physical spaces, but symbolic ones: where art was made, ideas were born, and people came to confront their own inner dark.

For Hemingway, the café was a map of the mind. In A Clean Well-Lighted Place, it becomes a quiet refuge against despair. In The Sun Also Rises, it sets the stage for disillusionment and the slow crawl toward moral clarity. And even in The Old Man and the Sea, stripped down to its barest elements, it’s coffee that the fisherman carries with him as he heads out to sea — the last human comfort before solitude and conquest.

Most of his masterpieces were conceived there, or at least finished with a coffee cup nearby. It’s no surprise that the café became synonymous with Hemingway himself — a symbol of a writer’s discipline, a seeker’s rest stop, a place where people went not just to escape, but to understand.

“Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He spilled the coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire. He lit a cigarette and went inside the tent. He took off his shoes and trousers, sitting on the blankets, rolled the shoes up inside the trousers for a pillow and got in between the blankets.”

To be in a café, notebook open, coffee in hand — that, somehow, is already halfway to writing.

murakami: coffee and solitude

“The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.”

— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

For Haruki Murakami, coffee is more than a beverage — it’s a daily ritual that offers structure, solitude, and quiet awe in a world that often feels slippery and strange. In his universe, where cats talk, jazz drifts through the air, and parallel realities quietly open up, coffee remains reassuringly real. His characters, often lonely and introspective, anchor themselves to the mundane magic of brewing, pouring, and sipping. In A Wild Sheep Chase, the protagonist begins with bitter, forgettable coffee from a university café, but as the novel unfolds, he begins to embrace the slow, deliberate ritual of hand-dripped brews — a small but significant evolution.

Murakami treats coffee as a kind of emotional cartography: its preparation and consumption mirroring the inner landscapes of his characters. When their lives feel disordered, their brewing becomes obsessive — a way to impose rhythm where none exists. When they're in pain, coffee is comfort. And in rare moments of clarity or connection, it becomes a silent witness.

“Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets, college kids were planning their next ski trip and discussing the new Police album. We could have been in any city in Japan. Transplant this coffee shop scene to Yokohama or Fukuoka and nothing would seem out of place. In spite of which — or, rather, all the more because — here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here”

In this way, coffee isn’t just a drink in Murakami’s fiction — it’s a metaphor for the fragile order his characters carve out for themselves, one quiet cup at a time.

coffee across literature

Beyond these names, coffee drifts like a quiet river through literature. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence, after 360 pages of emotional murk, offers coffee at last as a sign of striving towards clarity.

Even off the page, writers have nursed a profound devotion:

• Charles Dickens drinking at the Garrick Club.

• Virginia Woolf savoring Turkish coffee between sentences.

• Pablo Neruda, weaving coffee into his poetry.

• Benjamin Franklin, conducting political meetings over coffee-shop tables.

• Gertrude Stein, declaring that “coffee gives you time to think.”

• Voltaire, consuming forty cups a day and outliving every dire prediction.

Each cup carried something more than caffeine: a gesture toward focus, or courage, or connection.

Across centuries, across continents, writers have reached for coffee not merely to wake but to dream harder. There is something about the dark brew — its bitterness, its heat — that mirrors the writing life itself: restless, burning, impossible to tame. Sartre and de Beauvoir, hunched at a corner table at Café de Flore, spun entire universes from black porcelain cups: freedom, existence, love, despair. In smoky American diners, J.D. Salinger filled endless notebooks with fleeting sketches of innocence, fuelled by coffee and cigarettes, trying to catch something real before it vanished.

final thoughts

Coffee has always been a writer’s quiet rebellion against time: a way to sit still while the mind races forward. A way to insist, against all evidence, that the next sentence will come, that something true might yet be said. Writers do not merely drink coffee; they conspire with it. They know the secret at the bottom of every cup: that creation requires both urgency and patience, both motion and stillness. Coffee rushes through the blood, yes — but it also roots the writer in the slow, stubborn act of making something out of nothing.

Even now, in cafés and kitchens and solitary corners around the world, the old ritual continues. Mugs sweat on tables. Pens pause mid-air. Steam curls upward like a prayer. We reach, again and again, for the dark elixir — not simply to stay awake, but to stay alive to the possibility that in this cup, at this hour, some small, necessary miracle might begin.

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P.S. What’s your go-to coffee order? Tell me in the comments below. Love, Anna 💕