I’m on a coffee kick! Following up on my post about coffee and personality, I wanted to take a look at Jack Kerouac’s coffee habits.
Although people are quick to point to Jack Kerouac’s proclivity for alcohol, he downed coffee while writing On the Road. Okay, he may have also been hopped up on bennies—that’s Benzedrine—but his intake of coffee during that writing spree is notorious.
In the famous Paris Review interview between Kerouac and Ted Berrigan, Kerouac said that it wasn’t until Satori in Paris that he “wrote with drink at my side (cognac and malt liquor).”
Of writing, Book of Dreams, he explained how coffee entered into his writing process:
Bleary eyes, insaned mind bemused and mystified by sleep, details that pop out even as you write them you don’t know what they mean, till you wake up, have coffee, look at it, and see the logic of dreams in dream language itself, see?
As for how he took his coffee, Kerouac apparently drank it black.
Stephanie Nikolopoulos 
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