IRVIN COBB



                  C -O- B -B
                     By Sinclair Lewis
A man has to be not only famous but well-beloved before the
little facts of his biography become known to any one but his
mother and his aunts. Voltaire and Rousseau are useful per-
sons to whom to refer when you are dragged to a talk-party,
but you feel no burning curiosity as to where they were born
or what editorial page saw their first effusions. It is Robert
Louis Stevenson whose home in Samoa you photograph; whose
refuge in Monterey you visit. And so it is with Irvin S. Cobb,
who is three things: a big reporter, a big writer, and a big man.

If there is a newspaperman in New York who says that he
doesn't know that Cobb was born in Paducah, Kentucky, in
1876; that his first newspaper work was on the Paducah Daily
News, that he did the Goebel murder trial, moved to Louis-
ville, came to New York and stole a job on the Evening Sun,
then that newspaperman is one of the I-knew-him-when club,
whose family name is Legion and whose middle name is occa-
sionally Liar. To be a New York newspaperman it is neces-
sary to know Doc Perry's and the fact that Cobb was born in
Paducah.
There's a reason for it other than the fact that Cobb is a big
writer and a well-beloved man. That is: Cobb has made
Paducah, and all the other Paducahs-in Kentucky, and Min-
nesota, and California, and Vermont-from which the rest of
us came, live for us, in fiction which gets us as no foreign tale
ever can. He makes one smell the soil-a thing that has been
said of him so often that it is a platitude.
Covering the Portsmouth Peace Conference for the Sun, writ-
ing humorous stuff for the Evening World, making a national
reputation for straight reporting with his account of the Thaw
trial, Irvin Cobb had developed into a good, dependable star
reporter when suddenly he broke away and in a story in the



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