Irvin S. Cobb

Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb was born on June 23, 1876, in Paducah, Kentucky, the second of four children. His maternal grandfather, Reuben Saunders, M.D., was credited with discovering in 1873 that morphine-atropine injections were useful in treating cholera. Cobb attended public and private elementary schools before enrolling at William A. Cade's Academy with the intention of studying law. That path was cut short when, at age sixteen, his father became an alcoholic following the death of Cobb's grandfather, forcing Cobb to leave school and seek employment. The people and events of his Paducah upbringing later formed the foundation of much of his creative output, and he would eventually be nicknamed the Duke of Paducah.

Cobb entered journalism at seventeen with the Paducah Daily News and by nineteen had become the youngest managing news editor in the country. After a period at the Louisville Evening Post, he relocated to New York City in 1904, where he spent the rest of his life. He was hired by the Evening Sun, which dispatched him to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to cover the Russian-Japanese peace negotiations. His dispatches, which focused on the personalities involved including President Theodore Roosevelt, were syndicated nationally under the title Making Peace at Portsmouth and attracted the attention of Joseph Pulitzer, whose New York World subsequently hired Cobb at a salary that made him the highest-paid staff reporter in the United States. During the 1907 murder trial of Harry Kendall Thaw, Cobb coined the term sob sister to describe the women journalists covering the proceedings.

In 1911 Cobb joined The Saturday Evening Post, for which he covered the First World War. His experiences produced the 1915 book Paths of Glory. On a second trip to France, he reported on the unit known as the Harlem Hellfighters, drawing particular attention to Croix de Guerre recipients Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts. His article Young Black Joe, published in The Saturday Evening Post on August 24, 1918, and later collected in The Glory of the Coming, documented the discipline and courage of Black American soldiers fighting in Europe and reached a national readership exceeding two million, with wide reprinting in the Black press. During the 1920 Democratic Convention, Cobb himself received 1.5 votes on the twenty-third presidential ballot. His anecdotal memoir Exit Laughing, published in 1941, included a firsthand account of the 1900 assassination of Kentucky Governor William Goebel and the subsequent trials of the killers.

Beyond journalism and books, Cobb collaborated on dramatic productions and contributed to Broadway as both a composer and book writer. His theatrical credits include the musicals Funabashi and Under Sentence. He also authored more than sixty books and three hundred short stories over the course of his career.

Several of Cobb's works were adapted for the silent screen, and he wrote screen titles for other films, including the 1921 Jackie Coogan vehicle Peck's Bad Boy. With the arrival of sound, additional adaptations followed, among them The Woman Accused in 1933, which featured Cary Grant. John Ford drew on Cobb's Judge Priest short stories for two feature films: Judge Priest in 1934, with Will Rogers in the title role, and The Sun Shines Bright in 1953, based on three of Cobb's stories. Cobb also pursued an acting career, appearing in ten films between 1932 and 1938, including Pepper, Everybody's Old Man, and Hawaii Calls. He served as host of the seventh Academy Awards ceremony in 1935.

In 1919, former U.S. Navy officer and lawyer Captain W. H. Slayton recruited Cobb to chair the Authors and Artists Committee of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. In that role Cobb helped extend the organization's message through media and artist networks. He also published the anti-Prohibition novel Red Likker. Following the repeal of Prohibition, Frankfort Distilleries engaged him to compile a recipe book on mixing drinks. The animated cartoon The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos caricatured him as Irvin S. Frog.

Cobb married Laura Spencer Baker of Savannah, Georgia. Their daughter, Elisabeth Cobb, born in 1902 and died in 1959, was also an author, publishing the novel She Was a Lady and the nonfiction My Wayward Parent in 1945, a book about her father. Elisabeth's first husband was Frank Michler Chapman, Jr., son of the ornithologist Frank Michler Chapman. Cobb's granddaughter, Buff Cobb, was a television actress in the early 1950s and became the second wife of journalist Mike Wallace. In 1915, composer G. E. Holmes honored Cobb with the march The War Correspondent, published by the John Church Company. Cobb was inducted into the Kentucky Writers' Hall of Fame on February 2, 2017.

Cobb died in New York City on March 11, 1944. His body was returned to Paducah, where his ashes were placed beneath a dogwood tree. The granite boulder marking the site bears the inscription Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb 1876–1944 Back Home.