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IRVIN COBB
HIS BOOK
BY CHARLES DANA GIBSON
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IRVIN
COBB
HIS BOOK
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FRIENDLY TRIBUTES
UPON THE
OCCASION OF A DINNER TENDERED TO
IRVIN SHREWSBURY COBB AT THE
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IRVIN COBB-THE MAN WHO STAYED
DISCOVERED: Being Some Extracts from an
Appreciation by Robert H. Davis in the New York
Sun, October 19, 1912.
It is not for me to indicate when the big events in his life will
occur or to lay the milestones of the route along which he
will travel. I know only that they are in the future, and that,
regardless of any of his achievements in the past, Irvin Cobb
has not yet come into' his own.
I know of no single instance where one man has shown such
fecundity and quality as Irvin Cobb has so far evinced, and it
is my opinion that at fifty his complete works will contain more
good humor, more good short stories, and at least one bigger
novel than the works of any other single contemporaneous
writer.
One is impressed not only with the beauty and simplicity of his
prose, but with the tremendous power of his tragic concep-
tions and his art in dealing with terror. There appears to be
no phase of human emotion beyond his pen. Without an effort
he rises from the level of actualities to the high peaks of bound-
less imagination, invoking laughter or tears at will.
8
He writes in octaves, striking instinctively all the chords of
humor, tragedy, pathos, and romance with either hand. Ob-
serve this man, in his thirty-seventh year, possessing gifts the
limitations of which even he himself has not yet recognized.
Y
There seem to be no pinnacles along the horizon of the liter-
ary future that are beyond him. If he uses his pen for an
Alpine stock, the Matterhorn is his.
Some critics and reviewers do not entirely agree with me con-
cerning Cobb; but they will.
IRVIN COBB HIS BOOK
EUROPE
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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
HIS BOOK
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
IRI OBHSBO
and "Cobb's Bill-of-Fare," then with irreverent things about
the tourists and real-estate artists from the Grand Canyon to
San Francisco, published as "Roughing It De Luxe," and still
more irreverent things about the grand old game of doing the
American tourist, published in "Europe Revised."
And then the Great War, and Cobb's account of it in "Paths
of Glory.