Papers in mathematics are generally written as if the major insights suddenly appeared, unbidden, in a notebook on the researcher's desk and then were fleshed out into the final paper.
While this is great for finding out about results, it's terrible for finding out about how they were arrived at.
What I want are papers, books or essays written by researchers about their work on problems, especially if they describe the evolution of their work on a specific problem (Polya's writings on problem-solving are great, but not what I'm interested in). I'd like to know how hundred-page treatises on problems unsolved for decades are born.
