IRVIN COBB



Saturday Evening Post, a story called "The Escape of Mr.
Trimm," he made himself known as a probable genius. No
one could tell, yet, but in that story, the dramatic structure of
it, the words like sparks from a third-rail in a snow-storm, the
intensity with which the author saw himself as the chief char-
acter of the tale, there was evidenced a new American genius.
Lord knows we needed him. We had-we still have-been
letting England and France and Kulturland beat us ten to one
in fiction. We had-we still have-a number of expert pen-
men who could do well with a wealthy young Yale grad. in a
motor car; others, largely feminine, who could cheer our
hearts with sweet stories about the Little Woman Who Always
Smiled. But where were the writers who could go out on the
street, really see the folks going by, and present them truth-
fully and interestingly in fiction With one lone short story,
Cobb had elected himself as one member of that missing and
much need class of geniuses.
Stories of the South followed; other stories, too, of New York.
The mere list of them, as they appear in the two books called
"Back Home" and "The Escape of Mr. Trimm" is enough
to bring thrills to every reader of fiction: The Belled Buz-
zard, An Occurrence up a Side Street, Another of Those Cub
Reporter Stories, Smoke of Battle, The Exit of Anse Dugmore,
Fishhead; Words and Music, Five Hundred Dollars Reward,
Up Clay Street, The Mob from Massac, Black and White, and
the rest ..    .. "Words and Music," the first story in
"Back Home" might be used as a test for the Americanism of
anybody. It's a seditious, Confederate, Southern story, but
anybody, Yank or Southerner, who doesn't thrill to it, doesn't
feel all the old traditions of the real country when he reads it,
is a fake-American, a person of hyphenation.
Meanwhile, writing these slices of authentic genius, Cobb was
not forgetting his humor, and he decorated the Saturday Even-
ing Post with improper references to stomachs and dentists and
vittles and art, published in book form as "Cobb's Anatomy,"



H IS B O OK