Katharine Holland Brown: Hard to answer. Reared on the classics,—by the simple device of keeping them on the top shelves, with the grave command, "Not to be read till you grow up." Will admit to an extreme preference for the most recent of the current fiction.
F. R. Buckley: Hard to say how much I got from classics and so on. A great deal. Rough guess—should say Rudyard Kipling and an English author named Neil Lyons were my best teachers.
Prosper Buranelli: Reading current literature does nothing but harm. Read Sophocles.
Thompson Burtis: I should say that all the superficialities of the craft I have learned from current authors. Fundamentals, such as vocabulary and characterization, I believe I learned from the classics. As a young and green writer, I believe I am picking up tricks of the trade constantly from my contemporaries.
George M. A. Cain: How much I owe to reading current or classic authors I have not the slightest idea. I have not consciously studied the work in half a dozen stories. And I have not, within my memory, read a story without a certain critical attitude which unconsciously noted its structural features. For all the readiness with which my mind conjures settings for what I read, I don't think I have ever read anything without constant consciousness of the man who wrote it, or ever forgotten to watch the writing. Though I was late in putting my efforts to actual use, my desire to write fiction goes back of my memory. At twelve years of age I was habitually putting into words every emotion and situation and scene I saw, experienced or felt. I shall never know in this world to what degree that has reacted upon me to make me everlastingly the actor of what I imagined I should be rather than the natural doer of what I was. Perhaps I should put it that the expression of things has always assumed entirely undue importance. In that attitude, I have unconsciously studied everything I have read. And here I might mention that, for me, the greatest difficulty of the relation between reading and writing is the avoidance of unconscious imitation. I can not read ten pages of Addison or Irving, still less of Gibbon or Macaulay, without having my writing run into sonorous cadences that frequently are as out of place as a Gregorian hymn-tune for a coon-song's words. Writers of striking idiosyncrasy, like O. Henry, or Samuel Blythe in his humorous sketches, Wodehouse, or Harry Leon Wilson, or anything in slang or dialect, are completely fatal to the straightaway putting of what I want to say which is my only notion of a style of my own.
Robert V. Carr: I might imagine some writer helped me, when he merely salved my prejudice or put into words certain racial memories that harmonized with mine.
George L. Catton: Consciously, little. Subconsciously, it is hard to say; perhaps all of it. From the classics, ancient classics, none. Never had the patience to wade through a lot of explanatory matter and minute detail I found in the so-called classics—to get at a fact or truth that could have been put in one sentence to stand out in the clear. Classics? Not to my way of thinking! I don't have to be told one thing twenty different ways to get the guts of it. Classics? old-fashioned expositions of old-fashioned views and ideas, most of which have been exploded long ago.
Robert W. Chambers: Current authors, nothing. Classics, much.
Roy P. Churchill: Both are necessary. The classics for vocabulary. People and current writers for modern styles. One is as valuable as the other to me.
Carl Clausen: A great deal.