IRVIN COBB HIS BOOK
BY CHARLES DANA GIBSON
IRVIN COBB
HIS BOOK
FRIENDLY TRIBUTES UPON THE
OCCASION OF A DINNER TENDERED TO
IRVIN SHREWSBURY COBB AT THE
WALDORF-ASTORIA HOTEL, NEW YORK
APRIL TWENTY-FIFTH, MCMXV
Old Irv Cobb’s back home!J.M.F.
BY JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG
IRVIN COBB—THE MAN WHO STAYEDDISCOVERED: Being Some Extracts from anAppreciation by Robert H. Davis in the New YorkSun, October 19, 1912.
It is not for me to indicate when the big events in his life willoccur or to lay the milestones of the route along which hewill travel. I know only that they are in the future, and that,regardless of any of his achievements in the past, Irvin Cobbhas not yet come into his own.
I know of no single instance where one man has shown suchfecundity and quality as Irvin Cobb has so far evinced, and itis my opinion that at fifty his complete works will contain moregood humor, more good short stories, and at least one biggernovel than the works of any other single contemporaneouswriter.
One is impressed not only with the beauty and simplicity of hisprose, but with the tremendous power of his tragic conceptionsand his art in dealing with terror. There appears to beno phase of human emotion beyond his pen. Without an efforthe rises from the level of actualities to the high peaks of boundlessimagination, invoking laughter or tears at will.
He writes in octaves, striking instinctively all the chords ofhumor, tragedy, pathos, and romance with either hand. Observethis man, in his thirty-seventh year, possessing gifts thelimitations of which even he himself has not yet recognized.
There seem to be no pinnacles along the horizon of the literaryfuture that are beyond him. If he uses his pen for anAlpine stock, the Matterhorn is his.
Some critics and reviewers do not entirely agree with me concerningCobb; but they will.
EUROPE REVISEDBYOLD IRV COBB
BY ORSON LOWELL
C—O—B—B
By Sinclair Lewis
A man has to be not only famous but well-beloved before thelittle facts of his biography become known to any one but hismother and his aunts. Voltaire and Rousseau are useful personsto whom to refer when you are dragged to a talk-party,but you feel no burning curiosity as to where they were bornor what editorial page saw their first effusions. It is RobertLouis Stevenson whose home in Samoa you photograph; whoserefuge 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 hedoesn’t know that Cobb was born in Paducah, Kentucky, in1876; that his first newspaper