Ralph Henry Barbour: Who knows the answer to this question? Not I!
Frederick Orin Bartlett: I have absorbed, rather than learned, a great deal from current authors—especially English authors. The classics I feel to be an invaluable background—a background that too many American authors lack.
Nalbro Bartley: From the classics, I think I have learned much—also from the daily newspapers but not from current authors.
Konrad Bercovici: Reading current authors I have learned what not to do. I have only learned something about writing from the Bible, a little more from Balzac, and if writing were a trade and I were a young man, I should apprentice myself now to Anatole France.
Ferdinand Berthoud: None. Don't read current authors. Have never read the classics. I wrote my first story for my own amusement and without knowing that it was a story, and without any single thought of how other people wrote.
H. H. Birney, Jr.: Can't honestly say I've gained a great deal from either. Try to read current authors to learn, if possible, the secret of just how they "put it over." Have read most of the "classics" and have doubtless, though unconsciously, benefitted from them.
Farnham Bishop: I've read everything from Diamond Dick to Marcus Aurelius, beginning early and sitting up late, mixing my reading till now it is utterly hopeless for me to disentangle the results and reactions. There are huge gaps in it, and some rather odd specializations. How much have I learned from Homer and Vergil, and how much from Kipling and Conan Doyle? Blessed if I know the exact proportions! But I think that varying your reading is a safeguard against writing pseudo-Kiplingese and diluted O. Henry.
Algernon Blackwood: None. I read little fiction. As a boy I missed the classics, and have only made up a little of this leeway since. I never read a story without feeling how completely otherwise my own treatment of his idea would have been—probably, that is, how much better his treatment is than mine.
Max Bonter: Whatever I may have learned from contemporaries has been acquired unconsciously and without design.
I studied Milton intensively with the idea of letting some of his wonderful construction sink into me—particularly the first two books of Paradise Lost. Have never regretted the time so spent.