Literary brew

There has always been something innately literary about drinking coffee. In fact, it has become sort of a clich‚ to find poets and writers sitting alone in a coffee shop with a cup of coffee in front of them while scribbling in their notebooks or perhaps typing on their laptops. Maybe it's the milieu. Typically, coffeehouses are serene with only the buzz of conversation floating in the air. Or sometimes it's on a busy street, which makes it perfect for observing passersby. But most probably it's the coffee itself. Hot and steamy, it wakes up the senses. It perks up the imagination and makes our waking dreams a little more vivid and real. It is no wonder that some of the most famous and significant writers in the 20th century have made coffeehouses almost their second home.

In the 1920's, when Paris was filled with literary experts, coffeehouses were crawling with writers and poets. The Cafe La Coupole became a headquarter of sorts for some of literature's most enduring writers such as Henry Miller, F. Scot Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Along with the surrealists, they debated and discussed arts, literature and above all, life itself.

In the 1950's, it was the Beatniks, the motley crew of writers and artists that included literary luminaries such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, that filled the coffeehouses in New York's Greenwich Village. In a magazine article, the poet Sparrow defined the group as people in shapeless clothes drinking coffee in cafes and writing in their spiral notebooks while listening to jazz. Along with their cigarettes and steaming cups of coffee, Beatniks exchanged wild ideas and stories that eventually made their way to their poems, novels and art.

In his memoir Living To Tell the Tale, Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins his autobiography in a coffee shop in Colombia. His mother was out in search of him and was told to look for him in a place where journalists like himself stationed themselves almost every day. Another writer who once practically lived in a cafe was J. K. Rowling who was said to have written most of the first of the Harry Potter series in a coffeehouse in Edinburgh almost 13 years ago.

Most probably, however, for these writers what's even more addictive than the sweet smell of freshly brewed coffee is the strong kick of an idea that's beginning to take shape in the form of a novel.