Over the years, tales about the creative process have flourished-tales of sudden insight and superior intelligence and personal eccentricity. Coleridge claimed that he wrote Kubla Khan in one sitting after an opium-induced dream. Poe declared that his Raven was worked out with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.

D. N. Perkins discusses the creative episodes of Beethoven, Mozart, Picasso, and others in this exploration of the creative process in the arts, sciences, and everyday life.