Holworthy Hall: Love—Success—Youth.
Richard Matthews Hallet: A good yarn carries you out of yourself. It's a red wishing-carpet, a transporting cloud, nothing more or less. Makes you forget for a time the "everlasting, tormenting" ego.
William H. Hamby: Answered in above.
A. Judson Hanna: I believe that suspense is the elemental hold in fiction, having in mind the average reader, and the editors' demands. Speaking personally, the elemental hold is character and development. I have a sort of cynical contempt for happy endings because they do not ring true. Events and episodes in real life so rarely end happily, in my experience.
Joseph Mills Hanson: The elemental hold of fiction on the human mind I take to be the fascination of uncertainty.
E. E. Harriman: To me it seems that it lies in its power to reveal to one the minds of hundreds, to show in brief how other people live and think and act, and to cultivate in the mind of the reader wholesome ambitions.
Nevil G. Henshaw: Granting that you read what you like, I should say that it is the enjoyment of imagining some one's doing what you would like to do yourself.
Joseph Hergesheimer: The story!
R. de S. Horn: The elemental hold of fiction on the human mind is deep-rooted. It began in the make-believe days of childhood; it continues to death. It is hope, it is appreciation; it is akin to invention and progress. Without the imagination—and what is fiction but molded imagination?—life would be a pretty hopeless, sordid existence.
Clyde B. Hough: It is exactly in proportion to the humanness of the fiction. Humans are enthralled by fiction because it reproduces thrills, emotions, desires, etc., which they have experienced or can understand and which by the help of their imagination they re-live temporarily without any aftermath disadvantages.