Geoffrin was one of the major salonniéres of the French Enlightenment, who, along with Julie de Lespinasse and Suzanne Necker, transformed the Parisian salon from a leisurely social gathering into a center of serious intellectual and artistic enterprise. Geoffrin was born in Paris, orphaned young, and married off at fourteen to a wealthy manufacturer thirty-five years her senior; two years later she gave birth to the first of their two children. Denied a formal education, Geoffrin found a substitute in the salon of her neighbor Madame de Tencin, where many of the most important writers of the day gathered. By the time of Tencin’s death in 1749, Geoffrin had established her own salon; there, as the historian Dena Goodman has written, she introduced two crucial innovations. “First, she made the one-o’clock dinner rather than the traditional late-night supper the sociable meal of the day, and thus opened up the whole afternoon for talk,” Goodman writes. “Second, she regularized these dinners, fixing a specific day of the week for them (Monday for artists, Wednesday for men of letters).” The regularity and structured nature of Geoffrin’s gatherings became a model for other Parisian women and helped make the salon a key institution of the Enlightenment. When an Italian economist who frequented Geoffrin’s salons left Paris for Naples, he and his friends tried to establish a similar weekly gathering on Fridays, and discovered just how much skill it required. “Our Fridays are becoming Neopolitan Fridays,” he wrote, “and are getting farther away from the character and tone of those of France, despite all [our] efforts. . . . There is no way to make Naples resemble Paris unless we find a woman to guide us, organize us, Geoffrinise us.”
An 1840 portrait of Madame Geoffrin by Amélie Cordelier de la Noue
Geoffrin’s own lifestyle was as carefully regulated as her salons. A letter she wrote to her daughter from Warsaw in 1766 gives a revealing glimpse of the daily routine she followed both at home and while traveling:
I live here as in Paris. I rise every day at five o’clock; I drink my two large glasses of hot water; I take my coffee; I write when I am alone, which is rare; I do my hair in company; I dine every day with the king, chez lui, or with him and les seigneurs. I make calls after dinner; I go to the theater; I return to my place at ten o’clock; I drink my hot water, and I go to bed. And in the morning I begin all over again. I eat so little at these great dinners that I am often obliged to drink a third glass of water to appease my hunger. I owe to the severity of this diet my good health. I will be faithful to it until I die.
Carter was an English intellectual, poet, and translator who wrote for The Gentleman’s Quarterly and Samuel Johnson’s Rambler, published two books of poetry, and, in 1749, began a translation of the writings of Epictetus, published to great acclaim in 1758. A clergyman’s daughter, she was taught Latin, Greek, and Hebrew as a child, and she went on to study French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic—as well as astronomy, ancient geography, ancient and modern history, and music. Carter never married; as her nephew wrote in a memoir, “Very early in life Mrs. Carter seems to have formed a resolution, which she was enabled to keep, of devoting herself to study, and living a single life.” She lived with her father until his death in 1774; by that time, the subscription sales for All the Works of Epictetus, Which Are Now Extant had earned Carter enough to buy herself a large house with a view of the sea. Although she lived her whole life in Deal, a fishing port on the Kent coast, she generally spent the winters in London, where she became a member of the Blue Stockings Society, a group of literary women who gathered around the wealthy patron Elizabeth Montagu.
Carter’s achievements were due, in part, to her habit of waking early in the morning, which she claimed she could not do without assistance. “As you desire a full and true account of my whole life and conversation,” she wrote in a 1746 letter, “it is necessary in the first place you should be made acquainted with the singular contrivance by which I am called in the morning.”
There is a bell placed at the head of my bed, and to this is fastened a packthread and a piece of lead, which . . . is conveyed through a crevasse of my window into a garden below, pertaining to the Sexton, who gets up between four and five, and pulls the said packthread with as much heart and good will as if he was ringing my knell. By this most curious invention I make a shift to get up, which I am too stupid to do without calling. Some evil-minded people of my acquaintance have most wickedly threatened to cut my bell-rope, which would be the utter undoing of me; for I should infallibly sleep out the whole summer.
This description was written when Carter was in her late twenties, but according to her nephew, her days followed a similar pattern for most of her life. After being roused by the sexton’s bell ringing, Carter sat down to her “several lessons as regular as a school-boy, and lay in a stock of learning to make a figure with at breakfast.” But before eating she would take up her walking stick and embark on a 6:00 a.m. walk, alone, with her sister, or with a neighbor whom Carter roused out of bed and dragged along, half asleep, on her rambles. After breakfast, Carter retired to her quarters and divided her time among several activities:
My first care is to water the pinks and roses, which are stuck in about twenty different parts of my room; and when this task is finished, I sit down to a spinnet [a smaller type of harpsichord] . . . with as much importance as if I knew how to play. After having deafened myself for about half an hour with all manner of noises, I proceed to some other amusement, that employs me about the same time, for longer I seldom apply to any thing; and thus between reading, working, writing, twirling the globes, and running up and down stairs an hundred times to see where every body is, and how they do, which furnishes me with little intervals of talk, I seldom want either business or entertainment.
Carter continued this habit of working in thirty-minute bursts throughout her life; according to her nephew, she “hardly ever read or worked for more than half an hour at a time, and then she would visit for a few minutes any of her relations who were staying in her house, in their respective apartments, or go into her garden.” Despite waking between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m., Carter would often work late into the night, and as a young student intent on mastering three ancient languages she got into the habit of taking snuff to help her stay alert. Over time she developed additional methods of warding off fatigue during her long work hours. “Besides the taking snuff, she owned that she used to bind a wet towel round her head, put a wet cloth to the pit of her stomach, and chew green tea and coffee,” Carter’s nephew wrote. “To oblige her father, she endeavoured to conquer the habit of taking snuff, and would not resume it without his consent. This he at length reluctantly gave, finding how much she suffered from the want of it.”
Wollstonecraft wrote her three-hundred-page treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in six weeks. She always wrote fast, completing most of her works in a similar amount of time, sometimes to their detriment; in the words of her husband, William Godwin, Vindication was “undoubtedly a very unequal performance, and eminently deficient in method and arrangement.” But the English author’s audacity and indignation overcame any unevenness in her prose, and Vindication’s publication in 1792 made her one of the most famous and influential women in Europe. Wollstonecraft wasn’t one to bask in success, however, and soon moved on to the next piece of writing. As she wrote in a letter, “Life is but a labour of patience: it is always rolling a great stone up a hill; for, before a person can find a resting-place, imagining it is lodged, down it comes again, and all the work is to be done over anew!”
Shelley wrote her first and most famous novel, Frankenstein, in nine months, from June 1816 to March 1817—a remarkable feat for a first-time novelist, and even more so considering that the author was pregnant during the first several months of the process, giving birth in December 1816. She was aided in the writing by her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who proved an astute editor and was happy to engage in long discussions about the novel’s plot and form. The resulting pages, Mary wrote in a preface to the 1831 edition, “speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation.” But Percy’s assistance did not extend to helping out with their baby, overseeing the household servants, or attending to houseguests—according to the biographer Charlotte Gordon, “not once did he offer to help with domestic obligations. As the resident genius, he wandered in and out of the house at any time of day or night.” Mary, on the other hand, always stuck to a strict routine of writing in the morning, walking and performing chores or errands in the afternoon, and reading in the evening. Nevertheless, she seemed tolerant of Percy’s self-centered aloofness; after his death by drowning in 1822, she looked back on their life together as a shared idyll. “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper,” she wrote in the 1831 preface to Frankenstein. “I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days.”
Schumann was a German piano prodigy who achieved celebrity first in her native Leipzig and then throughout Europe, where she was invited to perform for royalty and showered with adulation by the press and by the frenzied audiences that thronged her performances. The young virtuoso was undaunted by the pressures of success, but her marriage in 1840 to the composer Robert Schumann nearly derailed her career. Robert required silence to compose, and as a result Clara could not practice piano—or pursue her own ambitions as a composer—during the days or weeks that her husband was seized by inspiration. “My piano playing is falling behind,” she complained during one such period in June 1841. “This always happens when Robert is composing. There is not even one little hour in the whole day for myself!” Eventually, she carved out a slice of time each day from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., when Robert, according to the biographer Nancy B. Reich, “took his customary beer at a neighborhood tavern.”
Robert was aware of the pain he was causing his wife, but he considered it an unfortunate necessity. He wrote, “Clara realizes that I must make full use of my powers, now that they are at their best, in the fulness of my youth. Well, so it must be when artists marry, and if two people love each other, it is right enough.” He never thought to help out with the household, and although the married couple was able to hire servants, there was always much to be done: In 1841, Clara gave birth to the first of an eventual eight children. Nevertheless, despite the children’s needs and Robert’s demands for a quiet home life, Clara did manage to continue her performing career. During the fourteen years of their marriage she gave at least 139 public concerts, a testament to her discipline and tenacity. It helped that the performances were an important source of income for the family—but, for Clara, money was just a convenient excuse. She wrote, “Nothing surpasses creative activity, even if only for those hours of self-forgetfulness in which one breathes solely in the world of sound.”
Brontë’s childhood was marked by the deaths of her mother and her two older sisters, and her young adulthood was marred by miserable stints as a teacher and a governess. (“I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfill,” she wrote to her sister Emily.) But with the death of her aunt Elizabeth in 1842, Brontë and her two younger sisters received an inheritance that allowed them to write full-time—or at least all the time that they were not engaged in housework at the family home, Haworth Parsonage, where the sisters spent most of their lives and wrote their novels: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette; Emily’s Wuthering Heights; and Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Even after she was freed from having to earn a living, Charlotte did not—or could not—write every day. Her friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell writes:
Sometimes weeks or even months elapsed before she felt that she had anything to add to that portion of her story which was already written. Then, some morning, she would waken up, and the progress of her tale lay clear and bright before her, in distinct vision. When this was the case, all her care was to discharge her household and filial duties, so as to obtain leisure to sit down and write out the incidents and consequent thoughts, which were, in fact, more present to her mind at such times than her actual life itself. Yet notwithstanding this “possession” (as it were), those who survive, of her daily and household companions, are clear in their testimony, that never was the claim of any duty, never was the call of another for help, neglected in an instant.
An 1850 portrait of Charlotte Brontë by George Richmond
As for her writing hours, Gaskell reports that Brontë and her sisters put away their literary work every evening at 9:00 p.m. At that hour they gathered to talk over their work in progress, pacing up and down the sitting room as they described their novels’ plots and, once or twice a week, reading aloud what they had written for comments and advice. “Charlotte told me,” Gaskell writes, “that the remarks made had seldom any effect in inducing her to alter her work, so possessed was she with the feeling that she had described reality; but the readings were of great and stirring interest to all, taking them out of the gnawing pressure of daily-recurring cares, and setting them in a free place.”
According to her brother William, the English poet’s writing was “entirely of the casual and spontaneous kind.” Rossetti believed that good poetry arrived of its own accord, and that trying to force the process was more or less a waste of time. “I never had my verse-writing power so under command as to be able to count on its exercise,” she wrote. After the release of her first poetry collection, Rossetti’s publisher inquired about a second volume. Rossetti answered, “Write to order I really cannot: not of course that I could not then produce somewhat in bulk; but if I have yet done aught worth doing, it has been by simply taking what came to me when it came. Indeed, if I may at all hope to be remembered, I would rather live as a single book writer than as an only-one-readable book writer.”
Howe is best known for writing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the 1862 poem that became a Civil War anthem and made its author famous and revered in her own time. But Howe also wrote several poetry collections and plays—many of them while raising six children, and in defiance of her husband, who opposed her literary career—and she was a tireless campaigner for abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and other social reforms. The year after Howe’s death at ninety-one, her daughter Maud published a memoir of her later years that sought to explain how her mother had accomplished so much. “First, and last, and all the time, she worked, and worked, and worked, steadily as nature works, without rest, without haste,” Maud writes. “She was never idle, she was never in a hurry.” This approach was evident in Howe’s daily routine, which struck a seemingly ideal balance of work and leisure. Howe rose at 7:00 a.m. and immediately took a cold bath (adjusted to a tepid bath in her later years). Then she had breakfast with the family, generally a boisterous affair, for Howe “came down in the morning with her spirits at their highest level,” Maud writes. With breakfast, she drank a cup of tea, which along with a little wine at dinner was her only stimulant—“for her spirits were so buoyant,” Maud notes, “her temperament so overflowing with the joie de vivre, that we called her the ‘family champagne.’”
Julia Ward Howe at her desk, 1906
Immediately after breakfast, Howe read her letters and the newspapers. “Then came the morning walk, a bout of calisthenics, or a game of ball,” Maud writes; “after this she settled to the real serious business of the day; ten o’clock saw her at her desk.” To “tone up her mind,” Howe started her day with the most challenging work, reading German philosophy and Greek drama, history, and philosophy (after teaching herself Greek at age fifty). Then she turned to whatever literary task she was engaged in, “put the iron on the anvil,” and hammered away until lunch, which was preceded by a twenty-minute nap. At mealtimes, she always ate whatever she pleased, with no ill effects; according to Maud, “It was said, in the family, that she had the digestion of an ostrich.”
After lunch, she returned to her desk to continue the morning’s work, answer letters, and, finally, read something lighter, such as Italian poetry, a travel book, or a French novel. Howe never worked after dark; if she didn’t have a meeting or another engagement to attend, she used the evening to spend time with her family, with dinner followed by “talk, whist, music, and reading aloud.”
If Howe clearly enjoyed her old age, it was partly because an unhappy marriage had prevented her from enjoying much of her earlier adulthood. She married at twenty-four and quickly discovered that her husband’s expectations of the union were vastly different from her own. Where she had assumed a relatively equal partnership with mutual support for each spouse’s intellectual activities, her husband desired a large family and a wife who would oversee the domestic sphere while leaving him free to pursue his own writing. Howe was mortified; she spent the first years of marriage “in a state of somnambulism, occupied principally with digestion, sleep, and babies” that, she wrote, felt “like blindness, like death, like exile from all things beautiful and good.” She pushed against these restrictions, at first timidly but with increasing boldness, eventually infuriating her husband by publishing a book of poetry (1853’s Passion-Flowers) without his knowledge or consent, and then repeating the offense with more publications over the ensuing years. It was only after his death in 1876 that Howe was able to fully enjoy her by-then considerable prestige and celebrity—so it’s no wonder that she filled her last decades with such evident relish. Near the end of her life, Howe’s daughter asked her “for a statement of the ideal aim of life.” The ninety-one-year-old paused a moment, then summed it up in a phrase: “To Learn, To Teach, To Serve, And To Enjoy!”
“If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room,” Stowe wrote in a letter to her husband in 1841, anticipating Virginia Woolf’s call for “a room of one’s own” by almost a century. Stowe was then thirty years old and had been publishing stories in national magazines for several years, and she would soon publish her first book, a collection of short domestic fiction. By this time she was also the mother of four of an eventual seven children, and though her husband, a professor of theology, was enlightened by the standards of the day—he encouraged Stowe’s writing and readily agreed to her request for a room of her own—he still expected his wife to take charge of running the house and raising their children. In an 1850 letter to her sister-in-law, Stowe described a typical day:
Since I began this note I have been called off at least a dozen times—once for the fish-man, to buy a codfish—once to see a man who had brought me some baskets of apples—once to see a book man . . . then to nurse the baby—then into the kitchen to make a chowder for dinner and now I am at it again for nothing but deadly determination enables me to ever write—it is rowing against wind and tide.
Remarkably, Stowe was able to write for three hours each day despite the never-ending stream of domestic obligations. (“The nursery & the kitchen were the principal fields of my labor,” she said later.) Her situation changed dramatically with the 1852 publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold three hundred thousand copies in the first year and made Stowe wealthy and world-famous almost overnight. This brought its own headaches: Within a few months of the novel’s publication, Stowe was “already besieged with applications for pecuniary assistance,” her sister wrote. But there was never again any question of Stowe’s writing taking a backseat to household work. When Stowe embarked on a follow-up to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her husband wrote to her publishers that “we shall do every thing in our power to lighten her domestic cares.”
Bonheur was the most famous female artist of the nineteenth century, widely celebrated for her animal paintings, especially her epic 1853 canvas The Horse Fair. Unlike other women artists of the time, Bonheur insisted on faithfully representing every detail of her subjects’ anatomy, earning praise for her “masculine” style. She was also notorious for wearing men’s clothes, which was not only scandalous but illegal in nineteenth-century France; in the 1850s, Bonheur was one of twelve women granted a cross-dressing license by the Paris police. (George Sand was one of the others.) Bonheur secured the permit because she said that she needed to wear trousers for her work, which required visiting slaughterhouses to gain her detailed knowledge of animal anatomy. She said, “I strongly disapprove of women who refuse to wear normal clothes because they want to pass themselves off as men. . . . If you see me dressed this way, it’s not the least to make myself stand out, as too many women have done, but only for my work. Don’t forget I used to spend days and days in slaughterhouses. Oh! You’ve got to be devoted to art to live in pools of blood, surrounded by butchers.”
In fact, it was an open secret that Bonheur frequently wore men’s clothes in her home and studio as well—but she had good reason to downplay this fact. Flaunting her cross-dressing could have caused public opinion to turn against her, which would not only have hurt the sales of her paintings but might have invited unfriendly scrutiny of her domestic partnerships with women. The first was with Natalie Micas, the daughter of family friends; they met when Bonheur was fourteen and Micas was twelve, and became close companions and eventually lovers, living together until Micas’s death in 1889. Soon afterward, Bonheur was visited by a young American painter named Anna Klumpke; eight years later, Klumpke asked if she could return to paint Bonheur’s portrait. Bonheur agreed, and before the painting was done, she confessed her love, which Klumpke reciprocated. They lived together until Bonheur’s death the following year.
An 1893 portrait of Rosa Bonheur
By then Bonheur had lived for nearly forty years on the estate she purchased at By, near Fontainebleau, which she and Micas nicknamed the Domain of Perfect Affection. When Klumpke arrived there in 1898 to paint Bonheur’s portrait, she was quickly brought up to speed on the great artist’s daily schedule. “I always go to bed with the sun and rise at five,” Bonheur told her. “Between seven and nine my servant and I take the two dogs for a drive. Then I work until lunch, read the paper and take a nap. After two, I’m all yours.” Bonheur used to work longer hours, she told Klumpke, but she no longer found it necessary. “Now I tend to dawdle, doing less but thinking more,” she said.
Later, Klumpke learned of another key aspect of Bonheur’s morning routine: The artist’s bedroom was filled with birdcages, in which she kept more than sixty birds, “of all kinds and colors, who made a deafening din from morning until night,” Klumpke wrote. Every morning after waking, Bonheur went from cage to cage, feeding her beloved creatures. But, Klumpke wondered, didn’t they bother her when she was trying to sleep? “Not at all,” Bonheur replied. “I never close the curtains, and the sun wakes me before my birds start warbling. I love to catch the morning’s first ray of light. That’s why I’m so happy every morning when the clouds haven’t deprived me of my favorite wakeup call.”
Birds were hardly the only animal in Bonheur’s care—she also kept, Klumpke reported, “dogs, horses, donkeys, oxen, sheep, goats, red deer, roe deer, lizards, mouflons [a type of wild sheep], boars, monkeys, the sweetest and fiercest lions.” One of the lions, named Fatima, was known to follow Bonheur around like a poodle, and the pet monkeys were given the run of the house. Of one monkey, named Ratata, Bonheur wrote: “In the evening she comes home and does up my hair. I think she takes me for an old male of her kind!”
But the real purpose of this extensive menagerie was to give Bonheur plenty of subjects for her paintings, and to allow her to work from her estate without having to make the rounds of farms, stockyards, animal markets, and horse fairs. To paint her animals out in the fields, Bonheur commissioned the construction of an unusual wagon that protected her from inclement weather, described by a friend as “a kind of cabin on four wheels” with one side “all in glass, behind which, protected from cold air, sat Rosa Bonheur.” With her animals and her painting and the love of Micas and, later, Klumpke, Bonheur had everything she needed. “I am an old rat,” the artist wrote in 1867, seven years after settling on her estate, “who after sniffing about over the hill and dale retires quite satisfied to his hole, yet in reality somewhat sad to have seen the world without taking part in it.”
Roosevelt may not have been an artist in the traditional sense, but she was certainly a creative force, an instigator of social change through a potent mix of optimism, pragmatism, stubbornness, and steady, ceaseless effort. As America’s longest-serving First Lady, she went on monthly lecture tours, made weekly radio broadcasts, held regular press conferences for female journalists, and, starting in 1936, wrote a syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” which she filed six days a week for nearly twenty-six years, with virtually no interruptions. After her husband’s death in 1945, Roosevelt became the country’s first delegate to the newly formed United Nations, and the following year she became the first chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights, where she was instrumental in drafting the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the same time she was active in countless other causes; she traversed the country for speaking engagements; she was a behind-the-scenes force in Democratic politics; and she wrote several books and stayed on top of a gargantuan correspondence—according to her autobiography, she received about a hundred letters a day, all of which got a reply. (Most of those answers were made by one of Roosevelt’s three assistants, but she personally replied to ten to fifteen letters a day.)
In her book You Learn by Living, Roosevelt considered the problem of how to make the best use of one’s time, a subject on which she had clearly had some expertise:
There are three ways in which I have been able to solve that problem: first, by achieving an inner calm so that I can work undisturbed by what goes on around me; second, by concentrating on the thing in hand; third, by arranging a routine pattern for my days that allots certain activities to certain hours, planning in advance for everything that must be done, but at the same time remaining flexible enough to allow for the unexpected.
Roosevelt’s daily routine was always packed with activity; “I don’t normally have many quiet minutes in the day,” she wrote. She generally woke at 7:30 in the morning and worked right up until her bedtime at about 1:00 a.m. Writing “My Day” was often one of the last things to get done, with Roosevelt frequently dictating the column from bed at 11:00 p.m. or later. According to a longtime friend, “She gets along perfectly on five or six hours’ sleep a night and apparently does not know the meaning of the word ‘fatigue.’ ”
Roosevelt’s example is inspiring—but for her assistants, it could be a grueling job to keep up with her. According to her daughter, Anna, Roosevelt’s work ethic was an almost fearsome thing:
I used to just cringe sometimes when I’d hear Mother at eleven thirty at night say to [her longtime secretary Malvina “Tommy” Thompson], “I’ve still got a column to do.” And this weary, weary woman would sit down at a typewriter and Mother would dictate to her. And both of them so tired. I remember one time when Tommy with asperity said, “You’ll have to speak louder, I can’t hear you.” And Mother’s response was, “If you will listen, you can hear perfectly well.”
Thompson was a famously opinionated and irreverent American journalist whose thrice-weekly news column, “On the Record,” reached millions of people around the globe. According to the biographer Peter Kurth, she wrote the column
by hand, in bed, where she lay most mornings until well after noon, reading newspapers, telephoning friends, answering mail, drinking black coffee, and chain-smoking Camel cigarettes. One of the secretaries was always in attendance to take down her dictation, but unless she had other writing to do—a speech or an article or one of her regular radio broadcasts—she preferred to work on the column by herself, and only when she was happy with the way it sounded would she rise and read it aloud to anyone who might be in the room. When a column was finished, it was hastily typed and sent by messenger to the Herald Tribune office, where it was checked for libel and grammatical errors (but rarely edited otherwise) and then dispatched by airmail or telegraph to subscribing papers around the country. Dorothy was then free to rise, get dressed, and pace the apartment for the rest of the day, a yellow legal pad clutched tightly in her hand so she could easily jot down ideas as they came to her. Quantities of foolscap, as well as Parker pens and L. C. Smith typewriters, were scattered the length and breadth of the house because Dorothy never knew when she might “get curious” and need to write about something. She would keep on writing, annotating, telephoning, and talking things out until the cocktail hour, when her friends would begin to drop by for drinks.
Thompson’s columns ran a thousand words apiece, and in 1938 alone she wrote 132 of them, as well as a dozen long magazine articles, more than fifty speeches and miscellaneous articles, countless radio broadcasts, and a book on the era’s refugee crisis. She got it all done thanks, in part, to a steady supply of Dexedrine and other stimulants prescribed by her doctors—but Thompson believed the real motivating force was her bottomless well of frustration with humankind’s chronic ineptitude. “I am living on quantities of adrenalin[e],” Thompson wrote, “self-distilled, from the fury I feel at every waking moment. The fury I feel for appeasers, for the listless, apathetic and stupid people who still exist in this sad world!”