=Bill Adams=: I have to admit that I know no current authors--I _never_
read a magazine story, and exceedingly seldom a book. Used to read a
great deal twenty to twenty-five years ago.
=Samuel Hopkins Adams=: How can one tell? I might guess at half and
half.
=Paul L. Anderson=: Mostly the classics: that's one reason I haven't
sold more stuff--too old-fashioned.
=William Ashley Anderson=: Not much--if any--from current writers, with
a few isolated examples--except for those who have already become
standard: Kipling, and authors of similar standing in various countries.
I believe strongly in the classics and regret very much that they were
not very deeply ingrained in me when I was at school, as they were
fundamental in literature. I believe just as strongly in the standard
works of literature. But I believe a professional author wastes time
reading current authors, unless the work has distinct and special merit
and is brought to his attention.
=H. C. Bailey=: I should put the classics (using the word in the widest
sense, say from Homer and the Bible to Maupassant and Mark Twain) first.
Good models are of any time and all time. From good models living and
dead and what I know of their methods I learned any craftsmanship I
have.
=Edwin Balmer=: When I began writing I considered Kipling and Richard
Harding Davis and Sophocles about the best writers in the world. I had
taken a great deal of Greek in college and took an M. A. at Harvard in
Greek and when I finished I could read classical Greek almost as readily
as English. I remember consciously admiring and trying to put into my
writing some of the sense of quantity which the Greeks used. The first
story I ever sold to a magazine was certainly strongly influenced in its
wording by Greek models. I still think Greek literature second to none.
=Ralph Henry Barbour=: Who knows the answer to this question? Not I!
=Frederick Orin Bartlett=: I have absorbed, rather than learned, a great
deal from current authors--especially English authors. The classics I
feel to be an invaluable background--a background that too many American
authors lack.
=Nalbro Bartley=: From the classics, I think I have learned much--also
from the daily newspapers but not from current authors.
=Konrad Bercovici=: Reading current authors I have learned what not to
do. I have only learned something about writing from the Bible, a little
more from Balzac, and if writing were a trade and I were a young man, I
should apprentice myself now to Anatole France.
=Ferdinand Berthoud=: None. Don't read current authors. Have never read
the classics. I wrote my first story for my own amusement and without
knowing that it was a story, and without any single thought of how other
people wrote.
=H. H. Birney, Jr.=: Can't honestly say I've gained a great deal from
either. Try to read current authors to learn, if possible, the secret of
just how they "put it over." Have read most of the "classics" and have
doubtless, though unconsciously, benefitted from them.
=Farnham Bishop=: I've read everything from Diamond Dick to Marcus
Aurelius, beginning early and sitting up late, mixing my reading till
now it is utterly hopeless for me to disentangle the results and
reactions. There are huge gaps in it, and some rather odd
specializations. How much have I learned from Homer and Vergil, and how
much from Kipling and Conan Doyle? Blessed if I know the exact
proportions! But I think that varying your reading is a safeguard
against writing pseudo-Kiplingese and diluted O. Henry.
=Algernon Blackwood=: None. I read little fiction. As a boy I missed the
classics, and have only made up a little of this leeway since. I never
read a story without feeling how completely otherwise my own treatment
of his idea would have been--probably, that is, how much better his
treatment is than mine.
=Max Bonter=: Whatever I may have learned from contemporaries has been
acquired unconsciously and without design.
I studied Milton intensively with the idea of letting some of his
wonderful construction sink into me--particularly the first two books of
_Paradise Lost_. Have never regretted the time so spent.
=Katharine Holland Brown=: Hard to answer. Reared on the classics,--by
the simple device of keeping them on the top shelves, with the grave
command, "Not to be read till you grow up." Will admit to an extreme
preference for the most recent of the current fiction.
=F. R. Buckley=: Hard to say how much I got from classics and so on. A
great deal. Rough guess--should say Rudyard Kipling and an English
author named Neil Lyons were my best teachers.
=Prosper Buranelli=: Reading current literature does nothing but harm.
Read Sophocles.
=Thompson Burtis=: I should say that all the superficialities of the
craft I have learned from current authors. Fundamentals, such as
vocabulary and characterization, I believe I learned from the classics.
As a young and green writer, I believe I am picking up tricks of the
trade constantly from my contemporaries.
=George M. A. Cain=: How much I owe to reading current or classic
authors I have not the slightest idea. I have not consciously studied
the work in half a dozen stories. And I have not, within my memory, read
a story without a certain critical attitude which unconsciously noted
its structural features. For all the readiness with which my mind
conjures settings for what I read, I don't think I have ever read
anything without constant consciousness of the man who wrote it, or ever
forgotten to watch the writing. Though I was late in putting my efforts
to actual use, my desire to write fiction goes back of my memory. At
twelve years of age I was habitually putting into words every emotion
and situation and scene I saw, experienced or felt. I shall never know
in this world to what degree that has reacted upon me to make me
everlastingly the actor of what I imagined I should be rather than the
natural doer of what I was. Perhaps I should put it that the expression
of things has always assumed entirely undue importance. In that
attitude, I have unconsciously studied everything I have read. And here
I might mention that, for me, the greatest difficulty of the relation
between reading and writing is the avoidance of unconscious imitation. I
can not read ten pages of Addison or Irving, still less of Gibbon or
Macaulay, without having my writing run into sonorous cadences that
frequently are as out of place as a Gregorian hymn-tune for a
coon-song's words. Writers of striking idiosyncrasy, like O. Henry, or
Samuel Blythe in his humorous sketches, Wodehouse, or Harry Leon Wilson,
or anything in slang or dialect, are completely fatal to the
straightaway putting of what I want to say which is my only notion of a
style of my own.
=Robert V. Carr=: I might imagine some writer helped me, when he merely
salved my prejudice or put into words certain racial memories that
harmonized with mine.
=George L. Catton=: Consciously, little. Subconsciously, it is hard to
say; perhaps all of it. From the classics, ancient classics, none. Never
had the patience to wade through a lot of explanatory matter and minute
detail I found in the so-called classics--to get at a fact or truth that
could have been put in one sentence to stand out in the clear. Classics?
Not to my way of thinking! I don't have to be told one thing twenty
different ways to get the guts of it. Classics? old-fashioned
expositions of old-fashioned views and ideas, most of which have been
exploded long ago.
=Robert W. Chambers=: Current authors, nothing. Classics, much.
=Roy P. Churchill=: Both are necessary. The classics for vocabulary.
People and current writers for modern styles. One is as valuable as the
other to me.
=Carl Clausen=: A great deal.
=Courtney Ryley Cooper=: None from current authors. A lot from the
classics, all devoured by the time I was sixteen. I had read everything
from Dickens to Gautier by that time.
=Arthur Crabb=: I think I have learned very little from reading current
authors, if you mean by current authors the average writer for the
popular magazines. I used to read a great many stories, but of late
years have practically stopped doing it. I have read and am reading
constantly classics, if by that you mean great books written in the last
three or four hundred years. I think that one of the reasons I am not
more successful is that I try to write, as I see it, along the lines of
the great novelists and haven't the goods. If I aimed at a less
pretentious mark I would probably do a great deal better.
=Mary Stewart Cutting=: I have read everything classic and current that
I could lay my hands on from the age of six.
=Elmer Davis=: Haven't learned it.
=William Harper Dean=: My work is influenced greatly from reading
current authors. Little through the classics, unless you include Dickens
among the latter. From him I have absorbed an invaluable conception of
what the true meaning of atmosphere is, the weight of the short sentence
and the power of the long one. But I am inspired in many ways when I
read Hall Caine or Hutchinson or Hamsun or Conrad. I aspire to the easy,
forceful style of Hutchinson, I want to be able to handle my characters
with that charming grace which characterizes Conrad.
=Harris Dickson=: I read spasmodically current fiction, browse among the
classics and naturally pick up ideas. These pick-ups are not, as a rule,
conscious. Things just soak in, as water soaks into the ground and a
spring comes out somewhere else.
=Captain Dingle=: Impossible for me to say. If I have learned from
anybody it has been unconsciously. Had I taken a master, I suspect I
might have got farther.
=Louis Dodge=: I get enthusiasm from reading current authors and the
classics; but I try to find my own stories among people and tell them in
my own way. To me a good book is like a preacher (the "ungracious
pastor" of Shakespeare): it says to me "be good"--but it doesn't show me
how.
=J. Allan Dunn=: I don't know. Don't believe much until I had myself
acquired a certain amount of technique and could recognize the
cleverness of others.
=Phyllis Duganne=: I've learned a great deal from reading current
authors. It's interesting to read a story and like it, and then pick it
to pieces to see how its writer made me feel as he did, how he made
scenes so vivid and people so real, how he took an ancient plot and made
it worth reading even when I knew after the first paragraph what the end
would be. And it's instructive. And I suppose the same thing holds more
or less in the classics. I'm much more interested in the modern school,
so far as my own work is concerned.
=Walter A. Dyer=: I have read studiously both modern authors and the
classics, and have got more inspiration from the latter.
=Walter Richard Eaton=: Nobody can say for me, I'd answer. One learns
much of his "craft" (in both senses!) from a study of his market, the
magazines. That is, he adapts the size (length) of his story, etc., to
the editorial demands.
=E. O. Foster=: I have been an "omnivorous reader" all my life, the
dictionary and encyclopedia being my favorite works.
=Arthur O. Friel=: Nearly all from current writers.
=J. U. Giesy=: All of it except what I have worked out myself. Have been
a somewhat omnivorous reader all my life.
=George Gilbert=: No author can answer that, for he does not know
himself.
=Kenneth Gilbert=: Current authors have been very helpful; classics
scarcely at all.
=Holworthy Hall=: If I have learned anything at all about any "craft," I
have learned it from Leonard Merrick, Mary Rinehart and Theophile
Gautier.
=Richard Matthews Hallet=: I've probably learned a lot from reading
current authors. Couldn't quite say how or what; and people who read me
may doubt the above proposition. The danger of watching the tricks of a
contemporary consists in liability to ape him in your own stuff,
especially if he is a powerful contemporary. We have with us all the
time young shadow-forms of Kipling, O. Henry, etc. I dogged Conrad
nearly to my undoing. A man with some writing instinct can pick up the
mannerisms of another writer as easily as butter absorbs a taint. The
danger from reading the classics is less, and such reading is probably
worth more to a man.
=William H. Hamby=: Not consciously from either: although I know I must
have benefited from both, especially modern writers.
=A. Judson Hanna=: I can not say that reading the classics has helped me
to write a story which will sell to an American magazine. I have
received much valuable help by reading current authors. For instance, a
story appearing in ---- has passed the test. By studying it I get an
idea of what makes a short story. However, the most help I have ever
received I gained from criticisms, by magazine editors, of rejected
stories.
=Joseph Mills Hanson=: It seems to me difficult to estimate how much of
one's craftmanship in writing has been gained from reading the work of
others and how much from his own impelling instincts and impulses. If he
feels the necessity of expressing himself in writing, his natural
abilities and limitations in narration probably govern his craftsmanship
in greater degree than any reading. I believe, however, that my own
_style_ has been influenced at different times by different writers who
aroused my admiration, both current authors and classic ones. Such
influence I think is detrimental to one's individual style and should be
guarded against. Even a poor individual style is better than a poor
imitation of another's style. But the _general effect_ of reading good
authors can not but be elevating and improving to one's own imagination
and narrative ability.
=E. E. Harriman=: Have developed more disgust than delight in
reading current authors, because I find so much that is
rotten-incorrect-ridiculous and out of reason in them. For instance ----
---- telling us that when on skiis, crossing snow five feet deep, he
found a bird sitting on its eggs in a nest. And ---- ---- giving a
grizzly bear a round track.
The classics help me most. For clearness in composition--Shakespeare and
the Bible. Drummond's poems aid me. Being foolish enough to do some
versifying myself helps me in prose writing.
=Nevil G. Henshaw=: I've got a lot from both, possibly more from current
authors.
=Joseph Hergesheimer=: All my early and important reading was in the
English lyrical poets.
=Robert Hichens=: I have learned, I think, a great deal by reading
certain authors, but not current authors. A book that has helped me is
Tolstoy's _Author's Art_.
=R. de S. Horn=: After the beginner has got the fundamentals of writing
straight in his mind the greatest assistance he can get anywhere is from
reading current authors and the classics. The classics show him the art
at its highest form: the models of technique. The current authors show
him the popular style and the trend of the times. Neither one should be
studied to the exclusion of the other. A fifty-fifty ration is best, I
think.
=Clyde B. Hough=: "How much of your craft have you learned from reading
current authors?" Absolutely all that I know. "From the classics?" None.
I don't strive to write classics, so why study them? The classics of
today, most of them, were not considered classics when they were
written. And the good human stories of to-day will be the classics of
to-morrow.
=Emerson Hough=: I hope I never imitated any current author. Could not
any classic.
=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.
=Sinclair Lewis=: I don't know.
=Hapsburg Liebe=: Since I never had any schooling, I guess I learned the
little I know from reading, both modern authors and classics--I haven't
read enough of the classics; they seem wordy to me. The average
magazine, I guess, wouldn't buy or publish half the classics now if they
were new.
=Romaine H. Lowdermilk=: Can't say. More from current authors, anyway.
=Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.=: Can't say, but doubtless I've learned a great
deal from reading current authors (for technique in current fiction) and
from the classics for the basic fundamentals.
=Rose Macaulay=: A great deal.
=Crittenden Marriott=: Mighty little.
=Homer I. McEldowney=: Thus far, I should say that current authors have
had more influence upon my writing than have the classics, due to the
fact that I read rather for amusement than for any lasting good which I
might derive.
=Ray McGillivray=: In so far as any one must be blamed, I believe the
classics--if you'll stretch the definition to include also Nick Carter,
Old Sleuth and the Dalton Boys--are responsible. _I_ set the onus of
responsibility at the door of my own general cussedness, the trait which
makes me lay off _any_ labor any time a bunch of good pals takes a
notion to drift from here to helangon, taking as equipment a deck of
cards, a few well-hidden quarts, a couple of rifles and shotguns, a
camera and some merry songs of the road as cargo for the old gas-buggy.
Such a guy _must_ write; it's about the only excuse he's got to
live--except the living, which is joy.
=Helen Topping Miller=: I read all the classics when I was very young.
How much of my ability to write I owe to those early associations I am
not able to judge. Of late I have naturally studied the craft of
successful current authors. From modern novels I do not feel that I gain
anything; indeed it is very rarely that I am able to finish a book
without being dismally bored. On the other hand, scientific and
historical works, especially ancient history and religious history,
fascinate me. Travel also forms a large part of my reading.
=Thomas Samson Miller=: Impossible to say how much I am indebted to
current authors and the classics. This is all subjective.
=Anne Shannon Monroe=: I do not read many current authors--haven't the
time. I know many are good and I miss a great deal, but out on our coast
we just have twenty-four hours a day, the same as in New York, and some
of them must be spent in the open, when the open is such an enchanting
wonderland. I read the classics in school-days--had bookish parents who
drove them down our throats--but not since.
=L. M. Montgomery=: I think I owe considerable to my greedy reading and
rereading of standard fiction--the old masters--Scott, Dickens,
Thackeray, Hawthorne. Occasionally, too, a well-written modern magazine
story has been helpful and illuminating. But, as a rule, I think
aspiring authors will not reap much benefit from current fiction--except
perhaps from a purely commercial point of view in finding out what kind
of stories certain magazines take! Most writers, except those of
absolute genius, are prone to unconscious imitation of what they read
and that is a bad thing.
=Frederick Moore=: I can not gauge what the classics have done for me.
There is some "bunk" about classics. But I believe that behind every
writer there is the inherited tendency to write. This trait seems to
well up, even if several generations have been skipped in the art. The
creative urge does not always show itself in the same _metier_--for
instance, it will crop out as music in one generation, as painting or
sculpture in another, or as invention.
=Talbot Mundy=: God knows. I haven't read much. Kipling has given me
more pleasure than any other writer. Have only just begun to read. Had
no particular education, beyond the usual grounding in Latin, Greek and
"English"--all worked into me with a stick and with all the useful parts
left out.
=Kathleen Norris=: The best modern authors, and all the classics one can
assimilate, seem to me indispensable. But unless one can read them in
their own languages it is obvious that the only gain would be in plot,
construction and character work. But every one, from Milton to
Galsworthy, for _style_.
=Anne O'Hagan=: I can't answer this, but I should say that I had learned
most of my craft from reading the English classics.
=Grant Overton=: In the beginning I really learned everything from
reading. I do not think one learns his writer's craft directly from
reading either current authors or the classics. I think he gets from
good reading a mental elevation and impetus. The rest must come out of
himself.
=Sir Gilbert Parker=: Nothing. I have always gone my own way, good or
bad.
=Hugh Pendexter=: I am not conscious of being helped by current fiction,
which I read for entertainment purely. I studied and taught Latin and
Greek but could never discover my work in those subjects has helped me
any in my work of writing.
=Clay Perry=: I am afraid it is impossible to answer such a question.
Undoubtedly the reading of the classics when I was a boy has had a more
lasting influence upon me than the reading of current authors in the
past few years. If by "classics" is meant recognized craftsmanship by
modern authors, I should say that I had learned a great deal from such
writers as Jack London, Edith Wharton, Hall Caine and a score of modern
writers whose style and craftsmanship is good. (One or both.)
=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.
=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.
=W. C. Tuttle=: At the risk of being called a "low-brow" I must admit
that I do not enjoy the classics. I have only read a few, which is
another "low" admission. I feel toward them as I do toward the old
masters in art--admit that they are wonderful--and change the subject.
=Lucille Van Slyke=: I ar'n't larned me my craft and never expect to. I
don't want to be either a deliberate or unconscious copy cat. But I'll
tell you this--it sounds funny but it isn't--Mother Goose is actually
the biggest help I have as a writer. Almost any situation in life or
books or plays will sum itself up in a Mother Goose rhyme, plot and all.
And if any writer knows a better 'ole--let him go to it!
=Atreus von Schrader=: With rare exceptions I find that I very much
prefer the classics, using that term in its broader sense, to current
writers. This is true only of the longer forms of fiction. The short
story, in its present state, has been developed within the last decade
or two. Jack London, for example, is of another period; tremendously
colorful, but too often lacking in plot. Upon rereading your question, I
find I have only half answered it. I believe the modern American short
story is in a class by itself for neatness and finish of plot. But for
color and substance, for care and matured thought, the older writers are
our masters.
=T. Von Ziekursch=: Do not believe I have learned anything much from
reading current authors. Do not know about the classics. Like the
Greeks, the Latins, the French and Russians. Thoreau, Anatole France,
etc. Am at a loss to answer this. John T. McIntyre, who to me is a
master of technique, has probably done more than anything else for me by
pointing out faulty tendencies to be guarded against.
=Henry Kitchell Webster=: I don't know.
=G. A. Wells=: What I have was gained both from moderns and the classics
in about equal proportions. I would say that the classics taught me
style, the moderns structure. The two writers most responsible for what
style I may show are Macaulay and Emerson, though I would feel guilty
did I fail to mention Lowell, Stevenson, Addison, Carlisle, Fenimore
Cooper. There are others I can't call at the moment. To me, Macaulay is
the peer of all writers, whether modern or classic, and I attribute my
style to him.
For structure I would earnestly recommend Post, O. Henry, Kipling, Mrs.
Rinehart in the novel, and De Maupassant; and more intimately, Gordon
Young, Mundy, Solomons and Pendexter, to mention a few. A student should
not study the classics for structure, provided he wishes to write modern
fiction. And to even matters, he should not study the moderns for style.
Moderns have style, but it is not the quality of the classics.
=William Wells=: Don't know; have read very widely, some translations of
the classics, am familiar with nearly all that is best in both American
and English literature.
=Ben Ames Williams=: I'm unable to recall having learned anything about
writing from reading modern authors. What I have learned from them has
been acquired unconsciously. I've read comparatively little written by
living writers, except that for four years I read all the magazines,
every issue, all the way through. I had never read Conrad at all till
some fatuous reviewer compared one of my stories to his work; the same
is true of Hardy. I am entirely at odds with the play-in-the-dirt school
of modern writers. They may be right; but the things that seem to them
ugly and depressing seem to me beautiful and even glorious. They, I
think, look at them from the outside. But as the fellow said, many an
honest heart beats under a ragged jacket. I'm not talking about sex
stories. I've no quarrel with them. I'm talking about the _Main Street_
school. If a man tries to take care of his family and help them forward,
I don't care whether he appreciates Dunsany or not; and if a woman loves
her husband and her children, she doesn't lose caste in my eyes by
failing to appreciate Amy Lowell. There are other tests of manhood and
womanhood besides a razor-edge taste in literature; and one of the most
valorous and admirable men I know, a guide in the Maine woods, who loves
his neighbors, speaks not uncharitably, helps when he can and tells the
truth, can not even read his own name. There is a splendor in the
commonplace life which most of us live, even though the only novel in
the house may have been written by Harold Bell Wright, and the only
poetic works may be the _Book of Job_ and the _Song of Songs_. The
assumption that when fine men die they must pass an examination on art
before entering the pleasant ways that wait for them seems to me utterly
unsound.
But this is beside the point; a digression. To the second head of the
question:
I get a distinct inspirational stimulus from reading the more-or-less
classics. Kipling, De Maupassant, Poe and some parts of O. Henry; all
the Frenchmen with whom I am familiar except Balzac; Fielding, _The Tale
of Two Cities_, _The Way of All Flesh_. Balzac is over my head. Dickens,
outside of the novel named, seems to me a caricaturist rather than a
novelist. _The Growth of the Soil_ I hold to be the finest novel I ever
read. No need of prolonging the list. Reading them over and over, the
books which most appeal to me, I always put them down full of a brave
determination to write something as fine. That the resultant effort
dwindles out discourages me only until I have read the book again. I
know no better way to put yourself in the mood for trying to write good
stuff than by reading good stuff.
=Honore Willsie=: I have read and studied current and classic writers
constantly as training for my work.
=H. C. Witwer=: Nothing from either.
=William Almon Wolff=: I don't know that I can distinguish between
classics and modern authors. I've learned most of what I know that way,
I suppose.
=Edgar Young=: Can't say. Have read many of the modern authors and most
of the classics. Also have read rather widely in Spanish.