Barry Scobee: Tee-totally nothing, unless it might be for a few minor—what shall I say, tricks of technique? This in the current story. I seem to have been unable to get anything from reading other writers, except in the instance of one or two I have come to know.
R. T. M. Scott: So far as current authors are concerned—and even the classics—I find that, when I try to derive benefit from them, I imitate and fall down. In other words I fail to be myself and a man can be nobody as well as he can be himself. Of course a man may derive knowledge and inspiration from all good authors, but he takes those qualities and builds them into himself so that they are part of himself. In this way all good reading is beneficial and I have benefitted. One thing might be pointed out. The classics stick in my memory much more than does the work of modern authors.
Robert Simpson: I have learned a great deal from studying how "the other fellow" did it. This applies to all sorts of writing from that of the rawest novice to Scott and Boccaccio. But Dumas, Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Stevenson, Kipling, O. Henry, Addison, Swift, Lamb, Newman, Carlyle, Emerson and several others of the big guns among fictioneers and essayists have had most influence on whatever style and technique I've achieved in twenty years of trying to learn how to write.
Theodore Seixas Solomons: I have no idea how much current authors have taught me. Mighty little that is useful, I believe, in comparison with the dangers to imitation they have constituted. The classics, however, read largely in youth, must have been of tremendous influence, but chiefly, I think, in the matter of expression. I think the story-telling art is a thing antecedent to any influence of stories or story-tellers, common or classic.
Arthur D. Howden Smith: Most of it, I should say, in about equal proportions.
Raymond S. Spears: I read magazines rather than authors, for I find that magazines generally group authors rather sharply—perhaps I should say magazines group moods of authorship. I read what I like, and I have five feet of bandits, badmen, desperadoes above fifteen feet of Mississippi River; and ten feet of outdoor hand-books and information, including pearls, formulas, wild animals, under six feet of classics, including Borrow, Plutarch, Poe, Ruskin, Emerson, etc. I am not conscious of playing any favorites among classics, dime novels, hand-books, government documents, poetry, history, natural history, etc.
Norman Springer: Practically all I have learned about story writing. I've tackled the living and the dead both, with good results.
Julian Street: I've read both—that is in English. I believe that Latin and Greek (languages I don't know) tend to increase one's vocabulary and beautify one's style. I know some French and Italian and I think languages help. It is good to read French—for delicacies of expression and grace of style. "The style is the man."
T. S. Stribling: I think I picked up most of my ideas on how to write from the Russians.
Booth Tarkington: Learned nothing from reading current authors; all from authors now dead. From the classics, I don't know what proportion.