A. S. M. Hutchinson: I don't know; but I think wide reading (not necessarily, or even at all, fiction) is necessary to good writing.
Inez Haynes Irwin: I do not think I have gained anything technically from reading the classics—with the exception of the Elizabethan dramatists. And I can not say exactly that they helped me technically—they delighted, thrilled and inspired me. I suppose, to be perfectly fair, I ought to say that the Russian novelists, who also dominated my girlhood, gave me my taste for realism. I have learned more than I can tell from the work of my contemporaries. When I was at Radcliffe College, following I think the example of Stevenson, my Harvard instructor had the class write themes in imitation of the Bible, Dryden, Walton, Addison, Johnson, Goldsmith, etc., etc. I believe now it would have had infinitely more value if we had been studying the short stories which were appearing in McClure's Magazine at that period—a great period in American short-story writing. I can not overestimate how much I have gained from the short fiction of such writers as O'Henry, Percival Gibbons, Edna Ferber, Fanny Hurst, Joseph Hergesheimer, Willa Cather, and of course Henry James and Joseph Conrad.
Will Irwin: I suppose that I have learned a great deal of my craft from both current authors and the classics. How much, it would be hard to say. One absorbs such training unconsciously.
Charles Tenney Jackson: As to "current authors and the classics" I read the former very little; and the latter seem to be part of a past curiosity which left me with a certain vague, large respect much as you would give to a ninth-century cathedral or a tapestry. I reckon they did their durndest in their time, but I could wish that some Athenian philosopher had stopped a moment to record what he ate for breakfast, how the family wash was handled, what he shaved with ... all about the life about him, in fact; the picture, the color, the motives of folk about him. My imagination turns from the temples to what possibly housed the cobbler who mended Caesar's sandals, and where his children played. The guesses of the classic writers as to the riddle of life are not of interest, for I have my own; but I would like to know the flavor of the common life about them.
Frederick J. Jackson: I can't say how much technique I have learned from reading current authors. The classics is an easier question. The answer is about nothing, net, plus war tax.
Mary Johnston: I do not know.
John Joseph: Have been a tremendous reader and student of both current and classic literature, and if I know anything at all about writing I must have picked it up in this manner.
Lloyd Kohler: I think that it's safe to say that I've learned a good half of my craft from reading and studying current authors and the classics. There is a danger in this, especially if one follows a certain current author too closely. It's best to read them all. As to the classics, there is little danger of ever getting too much of them—I'd venture that the average of us don't get enough of the classics. I know that I don't.
Harold Lamb: Current authors, no. I read them very little as a boy, and hardly at all as an author. The classics, yes, if you let me name my own classics.
They were my friends. They still are my friends. I refer to the coterie gathered together in the libraries of my grandfather and uncle. Messrs. Gustave Doré, Æsop, the Nibelungs, Roland and Oliver—the Song, you know—Pierrot, Prince of Tatary, The Apostles, Dante in Purgatory, Plato, Rider Haggard, Napoleon, Don Quixote de la Mancha (but Sancho Panza was a better chum). A host of others. But these had the finest pictures—an artist's library, and a poet's. So they were my earliest friends. I had others. Especially Francois Villon, Catullus, Henry, Babur, Li Po, Macdonald, Robert Burns.