The Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret–who reinvented himself as Le Corbusier in the early 1920s–maintained a rigid schedule throughout his professional life, yet it was hardly a punishing one. After waking at 6:00 A.M., he did forty-five minutes of calisthenics. Then he served his wife her morning coffee and, at 8:00, the couple ate breakfast together. The rest of Corbusier’s morning was devoted to painting, drawing, and writing. This was the most creative part of his day, and even though he often spent hours on paintings that had no direct relation to his architecture, and which he showed to no one other than his wife, he attributed his professional success to these private mornings of artistic contemplation.
“I like to get up when the dawn comes,” O’Keeffe told an interviewer in 1966. “The dogs start talking to me and I like to make a fire and maybe some tea and then sit in bed and watch the sun come up. The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.” Living in the New Mexico desert, which she made her permanent home from 1949 until her death, O’Keeffe had no trouble finding the solitude that she craved. Most days she took a half-hour walk in the early morning, keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes on her property, which she would kill with her walking stick (she kept their rattles in a box to show to visitors.) Then there would be breakfast at 7:00, prepared by O’Keeffe’s cook–a typical meal included hot chili with garlic oil, soft-boiled or scrambled eggs, bread with a savory jam, sliced fresh fruit, and coffee or tea. If she was painting, O’Keeffe would then work in her studio for the rest of the day, breaking at noon for lunch. If she wasn’t painting, she would work in the garden, do housework, answer letters, and receive visitors. But the painting days were the best days, O’Keeffe said:
“Today again from seven o’clock in the morning till six in the evening I worked without stirring excepting to take some food a step or two away,” van Gogh wrote in an 1888 letter to his brother, Theo, adding, “I have no thought of fatigue, I shall do another picture this very night, and I shall bring it off.” This seems to have been typical for the artist; when in the grip of creative inspiration, van Gogh painted nonstop, “in a dumb fury of work,” barely pausing to eat. And when his friend and fellow painter Paul Gauguin came to visit a few months later, van Gogh’s habits scarcely changed. He wrote to Theo, “Our days pass in working, working all the time, in the evening we are dead beat and go off to the cafe, and after that, early to bed! Such is our life.”
In the 1870s and ’80s, the Twain family spent their summers at Quarry Farm in New York, about two hundred miles west of their Hartford, Connecticut, home. Twain found those summers the most productive time for his literary work, especially after 1874, when the farm owners built him a small private study on the property. That same summer, Twain began writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. His routine was simple: he would go to the study in the morning after a hearty breakfast and stay there until dinner at about 5:00. Since he skipped lunch, and since his family would not venture near the study–they would blow a horn if they needed him–he could usually work uninterruptedly for several hours. “On hot days,” he wrote to a friend, “I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirts of.”
Dickens was prolific–he produced fifteen novels, ten of which are longer than eight hundred pages, and numerous stories, essays, letters, and plays–but he could not be productive without certain conditions in place. First, he needed absolute quiet; at one of his houses, an extra door had to be installed to his study to block out noise. And his study had to be precisely arranged, with his writing desk placed in front of a window and, on the desk itself, his writing materials–goose-quill pens and blue ink–laid out alongside several ornaments: a small vase of fresh flowers, a large paper knife, a gilt leaf with a rabbit perched upon it, and two bronze statuettes (one depicting a pair of fat toads dueling, the other a gentleman swarmed with puppies).
When Napoléon III seized control of France in 1851, Hugo was forced into political exile, eventually settling with his family on Guernsey, a British island off the coast of Normandy. In his fifteen years there Hugo would write some of his best work, including three collections of poetry and the novel Les Misérables. Shortly after arriving on Guernsey, Hugo purchased Hauteville House–locals believed it was haunted by the ghost of a woman who had committed suicide–and set about making several improvements to the property. Chief among them was an all-glass “lookout” on the roof that resembled a small, furnished greenhouse. This was the highest point on the island, with a panoramic view of the English Channel; on clear days, you could see the coast of France. There Hugo wrote each morning, standing at a small desk in front of a mirror.
Balzac drove himself relentlessly as a writer, motivated by enormous literary ambition as well as a never-ending string of creditors and endless cups of coffee; as Herbert J. Hunt has written, he engaged in “orgies of work punctuated by orgies of relaxation and pleasure.” When Balzac was working, his working schedule was brutal: He ate a light dinner at 6:00 P.M., then went to bed. At 1:00 A.M. he rose and sat down at his writing table for a seven-hour stretch of work. At 8:00 A.M. he allowed himself a ninety-minute nap; then, from 9:30 to 4:00, he resumed work, drinking cup after cup of black coffee. (According to one estimate, he drank as many as fifty cups a day.) At 4:00 P.M. Balzac took a walk, had a bath, and received visitors until 6:00, when the cycle started all over again. “The days melt in my hands like ice in the sun,” he wrote in 1830. “I’m not living, I’m wearing myself out in a horrible fashion–but whether I die of work or something else, it’s all the same.”
Descartes was a late riser. The French philosopher liked to sleep until mid-morning, then linger in bed, thinking and writing, until 11:00 or so. “Here I sleep ten hours every night without being disturbed by any care,” Descartes wrote from the Netherlands, where he lived from 1629 until the last few months of his life. “And after my mind has wandered in sleep through woods, gardens, and enchanted palaces where I experience every pleasure imaginable, I awake to mingle the reveries of the night with those of the day.” These late-morning hours of meditation constituted his only concentrated intellectual effort for the day; Descartes believed that idleness was essential to good mental work, and he made sure not to overexert himself. After an early lunch, he would take a walk or meet friends for conversation; after supper, he dealt with his correspondence.
