Michael J. Phillips: I have not read the classics extensively. I can't see Dickens nor Shakespeare. I consider Charles Reade, the Cricket on the Hearth fellow, and Blackmore, who wrote Lorna Doone, great artists and I suppose they influenced me.
Of course I have been taught very largely by my job, which has practically always been newspaper work. In the shortest newspaper item there must be a certain construction. It must have a beginning, tell its story in orderly fashion, and an end. In my formative newspaper days I had the advantage of being trained by a metropolitan newspaper man who was the best judge of news values I ever knew. He taught me unerringly, or nearly unerringly, to put my finger on the novel, the dramatic, the leading feature of a newspaper article, or "story," and play it up. I think that this has been of great assistance to me in fiction writing; that is, I believe it has taught me selection and emphasis—what to write and what was the more important.
Walter B. Pitkin: What I have learned about writing has definitely come from little reading, much observation, and an irresistible tendency to write about all sorts of things. Nobody ever urged me to write. I began it when I was a schoolboy, kept elaborate journals, sold a story when I was about ten years old for ten dollars, wrote essays, treatises, fantasies, poems, everything but plays, in fact; and have probably written in my life, in one way or another, at least twenty million words of copy. I have never liked the classics; have read very little in them; know only three of Dickens, four of Thackeray, never a novel of George Eliot, and so on. Am bored to death by things that are not contemporary and verifiable in my own life. (This is probably a violent reaction against too much study of ancient philosophy and literature when a youth.)
E. S. Pladwell: Classics and current authors have their reflective influence upon the mind; but I have refrained from trying to study any of them with one exception. Kipling's magnificent condensation I believe to be worthy of emulation. As for O. Henry, I think he is the curse of American writers. The person who reads one of his stories can not help but try, unconsciously, to ape the brilliant gallop of his style, and they all come to grief. The other authors have their styles, but to me they give little that is remarkable. With them it is the story that counts.
Lucia Mead Priest: I have always been a reader; I can not answer you. May be all I have ever done has come out of the reservoir of many years' storage. I should say it is a toss-up between the classics and modern literature.
Creative power is low and I have been a great reader; there you are! May be all of me is somebody else. Can you unravel that?
Eugene Manlove Rhodes: Current authors, none. The classics, all.
Frank C. Robertson: I should say that I have learned about seventy-five per cent. of my craft from reading current authors, and about one per cent. from the classics. Perhaps this is because I have devoted about the same proportion of time to reading each.
Ruth Sawyer: Everything I know has been gained through contact with authors—and these largely the so-called classical. Coupled with these, the most helpful stimuli I have had have come from the constructive criticisms given by kindly and humane editors.
Chester L. Saxby: The classics are mainly barren stuff for me—labored writing, involved presentation, devious and unnecessary description and reference, slag-heaps of introspection. I've learned from them—what not to do. But from current authors I have gained everything. I could say I have my little saints: Mary Johnston, Booth Tarkington, Jack London, Margaret Deland, Ben Ames Williams, Richard Harding Davis.