William Ashley Anderson: It is a mental stimulant. Like every other stimulant, the doses vary, and it affects various tastes in various ways. It has the power of frightening, amazing, inspiring, amusing, enraging—in fact working upon all the human emotions. It has the power to derange human minds; it has also the power to soothe them. Its appeal rests directly upon the curiosity of man, i. e., the insatiable desire of man to hear something unusual he has not already heard.
H. C. Bailey: Tell me a story.
Ralph Henry Barbour: The satisfaction of a craving for romance in a civilization that is more and more coming to look on it as sinful.
Frederick Orin Bartlett: The desire for emotional reactions greater than those the average life affords.
Nalbro Bartley: The opportunity to phantasy in a harmless fashion. The average person occupied with average tasks demands a release from monotony which wholesome fiction supplies. They want to see the commonplace glorified—even if it is between the pages of a book.
Konrad Bercovici: The human mind has never held anything else but fiction. It is the only real thing in life. Science is a myth. It has been invented by fiction writers.
H. H. Birney, Jr.: Fiction takes the reader out of the drab monotony of life into a new world of color and action and romance. He finds there what Jack London calls his "purple passages." That's why the shop-girl reads Three Weeks and The Sheik which bore most men to tears. Most women cherish, unknowingly perhaps, a suppressed eroticism. Sex-interest and sex-emotions are to her the greatest factors in existence. The average man takes his sex-emotions casually. Woman is essentially monogamous, man polygamous. (Gosh, I didn't mean to get in that deep! My wife would run me ragged if she read it. Sounds like I've been reading friend Freud, doesn't it?)
O. Henry covered the appeal of fiction to the average individual when he described the tired clerk who would remove his shoes, place his aching feet against the cold radiator, and read Clark Russell!
Farnham Bishop: Story-hunger, which is as strong as any of the other natural appetites.
Algernon Blackwood: I do not know.