=Bill Adams=: Life pitched against death; and man the
master.
=Samuel Hopkins Adams=:
"The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow."
=Paul L. Anderson=: The inherent necessity for excitement, which,
despite the Puritans and the high-brows, is as much an elemental need as
food.
=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.
=Max Bonter=: Fiction seems to take the reader over the hill--beyond the
horizon. The mind takes a voyage into the mysterious, reveling in
strange scenes, characters and situations. Then it swings back from
exoticism with renewed zest for the commonplace.
Fiction is the "holiday spirit" in literature. It is an orgy in which we
spend our emotions. We feel better afterward.
=Katharine Holland Brown=: The fact that we all like to dramatize
ourselves,--and the story-writer helps us do it? (This is a question,
not a reply.)
=F. R. Buckley=: I do not know. Guess--vicarious adventure.
=Prosper Buranelli=: The Arab spinning tales before a fire, or the
drummer telling a nasty story. Shocking the boobs and pleasing the
scapegraces with accounts of marvels either small or great, in which the
narrator would like to have figured--only he has a broken backbone.
=Thompson Burtis=: The fascination of overcoming, by proxy, through the
personalities of hero or heroine, difficulties, dangers and problems,
and of temporarily feeling with one's self the greatnesses of the
storied person. Particularly in fiction of more adventurous type, I
believe John Smith's kick comes from perceiving how much like Daring
Dave Devere he really is.
=George M. A. Cain=: I believe it is love of the more intense emotional
states. Fiction provides these by proxy for those whom circumstances or
indolence prevents from actual experience in sufficient frequency.
Others seek in artificial stimulants the heightening of emotions not
normally excited by circumstance itself. A few go after the actual
experiences. The trouble with this is the rarity of really thrilling
experiences, even for men or women able to spend their lives in hunting
for them, and the fact that no experience can hold its grip on the
emotions through repetitions. The actually thrilling experiences
readiest to hand for everybody are those of animal appetites, and these
are the most dangerous. Gambling, a little higher in the quality of its
thrills, is hardly to be recommended. Yet a certain amount of excitement
is really wholesome, necessary to save the mind from rusting in grooves
too well worn to call forth its activities. Personally, I believe that
mild alcoholic stimulants have always been a benefit to the race, all
their after reactions notwithstanding. But the raising of emotional
states through imaginary experiences offers what, in these days, is as
readily obtainable stimulant as alcohol has ever been, and one freer
from the objections of after reactions and of peril in excess. Hence the
value of fiction in inducing exalted moods.
And this leads to my ideas of character drawing. On the assumption that
the first appeal of fiction is as an opportunity for proxy experience of
emotions, it seems obvious to me that extreme character drawing is
generally a mistake. The reader can not imagine himself as a hero whose
characteristics are extremely different from his own, as any extreme
characteristics will surely be. Even when a character is so well drawn
as to arouse strong feeling of liking or dislike, I doubt if the
ordinary reader can take the interest in him or his imagined experiences
that he will instantly feel in himself as placed in the same series of
events. It is certainly difficult to acquaint a reader with any one in
the limits of a short story, for whose fate his interest can be aroused
to equal his good old love for himself. For this reason I rarely draw a
strikingly marked character for the hero of a story.
=Robert V. Carr=: Perhaps a desire to escape the commonplace, or,
perhaps, mental laziness and the desire to ride on the imagination of
another.
=George L. Catton=: To be amused. Eight-tenths of the population of
to-day are too cowardly to think and want nothing but full guts and to
be amused. Comedy will sell to-day, and slapstick comedy at that, faster
and quicker than anything else. And that rotten sex stuff--who but a
moron would read it?
=Robert W. Chambers=: Amusement.
=Roy P. Churchill=: Voyage into new seas. The elemental pull toward new
experiences.
=Carl Clausen=: Ask a college professor who teaches fiction writing but
does not write himself.
=Courtney Ryley Cooper=: Fiction is the world of our dreams come true.
For the clerk in the store, his dream is adventure. For the girl in
love, it is the Prince Charming. For the discouraged man, it is the yarn
of the fellow who fights past obstacles. We like fiction because in that
we see the things we would like to do become realities in the person we
easily can imagine ourselves to be. Did you ever see a reader wanting to
be the villain of a story? Hardly.
=Arthur Crabb=: Among the upper classes, a means of passing away an
otherwise unoccupied hour or two; to the middle and lower classes it is
either a stimulant to a poor imagination or takes the place of
imagination entirely.
=Mary Stewart Cutting=: It expresses what we would like to express.
=Elmer Davis=: Relief from troubles. This, I think, is as true of
realism as of the so-called "literature of escape." Realism at least
turns your attention from your own worries to other people's.
=William Harper Dean=: The elemental hold of fiction, if I get your
point, is through humanity's inner craving to see itself mirrored, to
have its tragedies and triumphs interpreted, so that each of us may say,
"Oh, that's me--my life! I have lived that, felt it. I'm glad some one
understands."
=Harris Dickson=: Perhaps, that each of us is his brother's keeper and
likes to hear what Bud is doing. Some of us love small-town gossip, some
crime yarns, some revel in the poetic, the romantic, the imaginative.
But from the dawn of time the Teller of Tales has been a force--like the
troubadour whose songs were legal tender for his welcome everywhere.
=Captain Dingle=: Wonder, I imagine.
=Louis Dodge=: That it enables an individual to go places and do things
(vicariously) and utter sayings which would otherwise be beyond him. A
reader is a man with a score of eyes and hands and feet.
=Phyllis Duganne=: Interest, I suppose. The main object of most people's
lives is not to be bored--and fiction can help them attain that grand
end considerably. And for people whose lives are dull and rather empty,
I suppose fiction offers an outlet; the reader can become hero or
heroine and do grand and noble things. Just like the movies.
=J. Allan Dunn=: In an attempt to be brief, I think it is a conjuration
of what he or she would like to have been if their lots had been cast
differently. I think it sometimes stimulates to adventures, to a
struggle against the commonplace. That it can undoubtedly mold opinion
and create a recognition of the virtues. That it can show--if the
fiction is painted with the colors from the palette of Life itself,
excellent example. That it is the poor man's purse and the
stay-at-home's vicarious romance. It is Aladdin's Lamp--the Magic
Carpet.
=Walter A. Dyer=: This is rather too deep for me. Fiction is, in a
measure, in its relation to life, what massage is to exercise. Mighty
useful sometimes.
=Walter Prichard Eaton=: Say--have a heart! Well, in one word--"Escape."
=E. O. Foster=: To my own mind fiction is as necessary as food to the
body. The tired man or woman may throw themselves out of the ordinary
routine returning refreshed to take up again the "hum-drum" labors of
life.
=Arthur O. Friel=: Entertainment; refreshment by substituting new
pictures for those of every-day life.
=J. U. Giesy=: The spirit of play--make-believe--the element of the
"might have been"--relaxation, change. The mind reaches out to contact
other than routine experience.
=George Gilbert=: Its power to lift the reader out of himself and make
him live in another realm.
=Kenneth Gilbert=: A sincere desire to escape if but momentarily from
the commonplaces of life. If we have imagination at all we are
adventurers; we have a curiosity to see the odd and unusual; to possess
a helmet of invisibility and the power of levitation; to have the
under-currents of human impulse that we sense yet can not describe run
before us as we would have them do.
=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.
=Emerson Hough=: Maybe bread and butter, and love.
=A. S. M. Hutchinson=: Being "told a story."
=Inez Haynes Irwin=: It offers release and escape from whatever burdens
life has brought and it extends experience.
=Will Irwin=: It satisfies the social desire--the human love of knowing
and, if possible, of liking, other people. And it gives the illusion of
widened experience.
=Charles Tenney Jackson=: The elemental hold of fiction on the human
mind appears to be that it is the last adventure, the last romance, the
bringing of novelty, of charm, of forgetfulness. Life for men has become
so standardized, so propagandized, chucked into routines by
civilization, that his primal stirrings--which, primitively, he
satisfied by clubbing his dinner out of the jungle or swiping a woman
from his neighboring tribe--must now be soothed in reading about it in
its modern phases. That's why you sell magazines--sure!
=Frederick J. Jackson=: Principally, I think, the chance it affords a
person to get outside of himself, to be for the time being, while he
reads, something he is not, something he wants to be, to live
vicariously life and action that he has no chance to live in the flesh,
but would like to live. Then again, to learn, to laugh--W. C. Tuttle's
stuff holds more laughs to the page than that of any other writer, to
me, at least. But what's the use? Some analytical guy will answer in a
thesis on psychology that will "knock" 'em cold. I can't or won't.
=Mary Johnston=: It is a mode of truth.
=John Joseph=: It is based on the almost universal passion to see the
_triumph_ of the _right_. And a story in which everything seems likely
to go to pot and then suddenly straightens out _right_ will always hold
the reader provided it is plausibly told. Sympathy for the underdog is a
phase of this point, too.
Too, every human is more or less of a hero worshiper, and has also a
tremendous urge to get into the limelight himself. And if he can't
actually get in, the next best thing is to imagine himself there. Hence
there is always more or less of a tendency to picture himself as the
hero.
This urge for the limelight is a fundamental trait of human nature, and
a very necessary one. It is simply a desire to appear well in the sight
of his fellowman; and it is really the driving-power behind all human
endeavor beyond satisfaction of the purely animal desires. Hence, a
story should 'rouse something in the reader that will make him want to
get busy and take a hand himself, so to speak. That is my idea of a
really good story--one that will hold the reader from start to
finish--and no mere mechanical perfection or nicety of literary diction
can possibly take the place of it.
I read lots of stories, (they seem to be published literally by the tens
of thousands) and after I have finished them I sit and wonder why in
Heaven's name they were published. And the only answer I can find is
"technique, structure and literary polish." Too _much_ insistence on
these points has a tendency not only to handicap the writer, but to
standardize style, and I read magazines the subject-matter of which
might every word of it have been written by the same author, as far as I
could tell.
Curiosity is another powerful element. Perhaps the most potent of all,
in a certain sense. A mystery story intrigues all classes of people. Of
course it must have the other qualities mentioned, too.
=Harold Lamb=: To be honest, I don't know. A child likes a story because
it opens a door that the child can not open of itself. It pleases a
child to have imaginary experiences, giving pleasure, the stimulus of
danger, and the satisfaction of curiosity.
A grown-up is pretty much the same. Except that a child desires
especially to have curiosity satisfied, and a grown-up likes to forget
things.
=Sinclair Lewis=: It affords an "escape"--the reader or hearer imagines
himself in the tale.
=Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.=: Imagining yourself in the same fix.
=Homer I. McEldowney=: The impulse, weak or dominant, that is in all
mankind--to be what he is not, to have what he has not, and to see that
which he has not seen. That, I think, is the elemental hold of fiction
on the human mind.
=Ray McGillivray=: The hypnotizing grasp it exerts upon
imagination--persuading, _compelling_ the reader to project himself, his
likes and dislikes, his sympathies and his ambitions into the story he
peruses.
=Helen Topping Miller=: The withdrawing of the reader from his own
world, transporting him into an imaginary place where he is able to
picture things as he wishes them rather than as they are. Every reader
has more or less yearning for the dramatic. In reading fiction he sees
himself the hero, fights the conflicts and achieves the reward which the
author supplies.
=Thomas Samson Miller=: Sentiment, curiosity, heroism.
=Anna Shannon Monroe=: The story hold--the love of a story, whether a
crisp anecdote or a novel; the thing that lifts one out of his
surroundings into another world for a little while.
=L. M. Montgomery=: The deep desire in every one of us for "something
better than we have known." In fiction we ask for things, not as they
_are_, but as we feel they _ought_ to be. This is why the oft-sneered-at
"happy ending" makes the popular novel. Fairy tales are immortal--in
some form or other we _must_ have them or we die. Fiction redresses the
balance of existence and gives us what we can't get in real life. This
is why "romance" is, and always will be, and always should be more
popular than "realism."
=Frederick Moore=: It is in the joy of make-believe. Animals have the
same trait in some degree. Also, "Let George do it." That is, let the
other fellow get shot while I enjoy the thrill but know all the time
that my slippers are on and I'm safe enough.
=Talbot Mundy=: It reveals himself to every reader.
=Kathleen Norris=: Might it be that life disappoints most of us, and we
like to lose ourselves in dreams where things come just a little nearer
comedy, tragedy, retribution, revenge and achievement?
=Grant Overton=: On the part of the writer, a desire to make some one
else feel what he has felt; on the part of the reader, the craving to
understand something that one does not fully understand, even though one
feels it and has felt it often.
=Hugh Pendexter=: To entertain. Once it captures the reader's interest
its power is unlimited. It can teach and preach and direct the trend of
national thought provided it continues to entertain. Christ taught His
great truths by parables.
=Clay Perry=: Stimulation of the imagination; creation of a fairer,
cleaner, or at least a different and more romantic world than that of
every day.
=Michael J. Phillips=: Good fiction is a journey, all too brief, into
fabled Araby--to lands of sandalwood and frankincense and myrrh and
spikenard and all those other wonderful, glowing words of which I don't
know the exact meaning but which lift us out of ourselves.
=Lucia Mead Priest=: We know nothing, truly, of mind and heart of even
our nearest. The writer plays the part of Omniscience. We like to know
how the other fellow feels; we like to see him messing about in
situations in which we, too, have been lost--or found.
It is human interest in the virtues and weaknesses of our kind. Fiction
is as old as man. Read it on the tomb of Ti or the more-up-to-date
"Beowulf."
Is it not curiosity? Perhaps interest in the affairs of the other
fellow, for we all love gossip--? Yes, all of us.
=Eugene Manlove Rhodes=: Putting yourself in his place.
=Frank C. Robertson=: It satisfies the longing for change. The body at
best is a slow and cumbersome thing, and practically stationary compared
to the flights of mind. In fiction we live thousands of lives--without
it we live but one.
=Ruth Sawyer=: I should say the same hold that folk tales have had since
man developed a mind. The desire for idealizing; the enjoyment of seeing
his own human activities re-created for him and the everlasting appeal
of adventure. I believe that the adult quite as much as the child reader
likes to picture himself as the hero or main actor in the stories. I
suppose one could sum this all up in terms of imagination stimuli.
=Chester L. Saxby=: I can't answer this one, unless you mean the selfish
desire in each one of us to picture ourselves as heroes--and the thing
called sympathy that we can't disown. But perhaps evolution makes us
crave these indirect experiences in lieu of direct ones.
=Barry Scobee=: Have ideas but I could hardly express them yet. Might
be, "A feller wants company." Might be, it suggests strength, success,
victory; contains warning. How's this for a theory? The human mind is
eternally seeking harmony. A perfect story, or a well done story, gives
a subtle sense of harmony, like music but more subtle. I think the
answer goes still deeper, and I shall find it sometime.
=Robert Simpson=: Conflict--the clashing of forces, or the pursuit by
one force of another that does not want to be caught. Conflicts may
appear in many guises, from a young love interest to a mastodonic fight
between prehistoric brutes, but in some form or another conflict must
predominate.
=Theodore Seixas Solomons=: We are immensely curious about life, and in
a way that mere description of it from the point of view of psychology,
history, past and current, geography, industry and the like, wholly
fails to satisfy. For it is man's specific reaction to his environment
in his efforts to accomplish his urges in which we are principally
interested, and in order that we may make comparison of our own
reactions with those of others about us, we crave not those dry,
statistical texts setting forth systematically acquired knowledge but
instances of actual men's and women's reactions to environment--actual
life itself. Thus any narratives of parts of the ordinary life of others
are more interesting to us, essentially, than text knowledge, but since
life is so largely routine and monotony, since there is so little in any
given actually true narrative that is likely to be in the least novel or
to afford us the comparisons which we crave, our appetite has been wont
to seek satisfaction in narratives specially selected to pretend the
exceptional and unusual; and those who satisfy this desire are the
story-tellers.
The impulse of the story-teller, then, is to present life in its
exceptional and therefore interesting phases and happenings--interesting
just in proportion to the degree in which it presents for our personal
comparison men and women in situations, and engaged in actions, which
lift them--and hence ourselves--out of the common routine. Thus,
vicariously, we slake our thirst for varied, high tension living, with
its emotional tests and thrills.
The fictional element is accidental, depending only upon the
circumstance that actual life fails, usually, to furnish the
story-teller with a completely satisfying narrative of strange and
unusual reactions. Actual life is so conditioned by the usual and
routine that even when the unusual thrusts up its head and people get
into unusual situations, the routine and the usual quickly submerge the
unusual--in fine, the story fails consistently to maintain our
exaltation to a logical end. Hence the story-teller finds that in order
completely to satisfy his hearers he must thwart this tendency of
actuality by continually substituting and supplying. He does not take
anything not found in life--else at once his art is defective. But he
uses materials of life that never were actually found together in life,
so far as he knows. He may find two-thirds of a story ready to hand in
an actual life story, and then he needs to supply from his mind's
storehouse of general-life happenings (_i. e._, things that are so
natural that they either have happened or may happen at any time) enough
to form the remaining third. The aim is merely to carry out as well as
possible the aim of the story-desire he seeks to allay which is to
experience vicariously sorts of life and living which, either because of
their novelty to us, or because of special urgings and aptitudes, are
grateful and satisfying to us.
Fiction, then, in the sense of its elemental hold on us, is that
conscious modification of the actual occurrences of life by
rearrangement of them so that they present to us _complete_ experiences
of the sort for which we yearn. The more perfectly we are enabled to
visualize ourselves as actually going through these experiences--and to
visualize the characters going through them amounts precisely to
this--the stronger the hold of the fiction because the more completely
and perfectly it satisfies the desire to which it is directed. Hence the
vital necessity of naturalness, whether the matter be of realism or
romanticism.
=Raymond S. Spears=: Fiction is an adventure to the mind.
=Norman Springer=: An escape from reality, or, at least, from
environment; and in fiction the reader realizes in a sense the wishes
and ambitions that are thwarted in life. It is the power to
make-believe.
=T. S. Stribling=: I think the main hold fiction has on human beings is
that it gives them imaginary experiences which they could neither get
nor think by themselves. It is first aid to the mentally lazy and dull.
As proof of this, take the "movies." These are even more obvious and
require less concentration than fiction, so they are correspondingly
more popular.
I am speaking now of the appeal of popular fiction. It is the same thing
to the public that the leg show is to the tired business man--born
tired.
However, one should differentiate the stages of the human mind. Children
read fiction out of curiosity about the world they are to enter,
grown-ups read it to escape from the world they have entered, old age
reads it to recall the world they have left behind.
=Lucille Van Slyke=: Oh, but you've asked a mouthful! What are Yonkers,
anyhow? If you knew the answer to that you wouldn't be an editor and if
I did, I'd weave it so hard into everything I write that even the most
blasé editor in Christendom--or out of it--would be walking about waving
the manuscript with sheer joy when he got to the end of it! But I'll
venture a guess--that it's the same thing that made E. nibble the apple.
=Atreus von Schrader=: It is probably the same hold as that of liquor or
drugs; it takes the addict away from himself, his troubles and his
ennui.
=T. Von Ziekursch=: Perhaps to entertain, but I believe it goes further
than this; the average person's life is a narrow thing--not what that
person would choose at all probably. Fiction to the mass offers the
opportunity to lift out of that close circle of existence, to live, to
see, to mingle with the world, to do the things which they are
physically, mentally or morally unable to do.
=Henry Kitchell Webster=: It is so elemental that it is pretty hard to
get back to. I suppose it springs from human gregariousness. We feel
enough alike, enough a part of all mankind, each of us, to feel that
what has happened to another might happen to us. Reading fiction
stimulates us, therefore, and exalts us with a sense of our own infinite
possibilities.
=G. A. Wells=: Fiction is to the mind an antidote for the mental aches
and ills of reality. It is in part a recompensation for living. It
transports us from what is to what we would wish. It carries us back to
the days of 'tend-like and restores the illusions of fancy. It is the
oasis in the dry desert of life. It provokes and at the same time in a
measure satisfies the spirit of adventure that we inherit from the race.
We crawl as babies from the crib to see "what's around the corner." Most
of us incessantly long for adventure. And, as we can not have
adventures, we soothe ourselves by watching others at their adventures.
Life for most of us is rather colorless, a routine made up of meals,
beds, offices and shops, with now and then a dash of pleasure to make it
all endurable. We move in grooves. We complain that nothing ever happens
to us. We are discontented that nothing ever does. We may wish to march
out with a gun and kill somebody. The law forbids. But there is that
desire, so to satisfy it we turn to fiction and see other men march out
with a gun and kill somebody. We want to go to Alaska and dig for gold
and have all sorts of scrapes. We can't. So we let Jack London or Rex
Beach tell us of more fortunate people who did what we wished to do.
Fiction is a safety valve.
=Ben Ames Williams=: People read fiction, I suppose, for the sake of the
emotions which it awakes in them. I'm speaking of the highest form of
fiction, which we call art. To stimulate emotion is the function of art
in any form; people enjoy this stimulant as they do any other, because
it is a part of human nature to enjoy being stimulated. Volstead to the
contrary notwithstanding.
=Honore Willsie=: The romantic appeal to the imagination.
=H. C. Witwer=: The reader's enjoyment in being a hero or heroine by
proxy, _i. e._, the reader, for the time being, is the hero or heroine
of the tale and rejoices or weeps according to the action of the yarn.
When they are gripped by a story they stop for the moment wishing they
were rich, beautiful, brave, famous, strong, clever, etc. While reading,
they are all or any of those things, in the degree the leading character
is.
=William Almon Wolff=: Its power to entertain. That is a statement of
enormous implications, and much less simple than it sounds.
=Edgar Young=: Arousing memories of sights, feelings, etc., etc., from
the subconscious mind above the threshold of consciousness, so that a
re-experience takes place. Where no such experiences have taken place,
sympathy from similar experiences of the reader.