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Notes C : T G Researching Cobb’s fame in the s and s was a reminder of how fleeting fame is. Today he is almost completely forgotten, and only one of his more than sixty books is still in print. . See New York newspapers, October –, ; ‘‘Treasury Fails to Act on Tax Chaos,’’ New York Times, October , . . Current Opinion, February , –. The profile of Cobb was headlined ‘‘Irvin Cobb, Our Leading Literary Heavyweight.’’ The rumor of being the best-paid writer was also fed by Cobb himself, for obvious beneficial reasons. A few months later, a popular magazine ran a photograph of Cobb in front of his country house with the caption ‘‘Irvin Cobb is one of the highest-paid writers of his or any other time.’’ Good Housekeeping, February , . . Irvin S. Cobb, Exit Laughing (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, ), ; Alexander Woolcott, foreword to City Editor by Stanley Walker (New York: F.A. States Co., ), vii. . See M. H. Dunlop, Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turnof -the-Century New York (New York: William Morrow, ) for an excellent discussion of the significance of city newspapers; Figures taken from Richard Harwood ‘‘The Golden Age of Press Diversity,’’ Washington Post, July , . . The Bedford Forrest comparison belongs to Cobb, ‘‘The Convict Who Made a Garden on the Road to Hell,’’ Cosmopolitan, March , ; Credit for the marvelous, but certainly apocryphal, headline said to be written by Chapin also goes to Cobb. Cobb, Exit Laughing, . . Cobb, Exit Laughing, ; For the story of Chapin and Pulitzer’s son Joe, see Chapter ; Walker, City Editor, . This is only one of about Notes to Chapter six such tales that show up in various memoirs. Though the quotation was dropped from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations in the s, the comment that Cobb made is still found on at least Web-based collections of quotations. See Chapter for the story of the remark he made about Chapin. . Cobb, Exit Laughing, ; Walker, City Editor, , . . Walker, City Editor, ; Frank O’Malley quoted in Walker, City Editor, ; Donald Henderson Clarke, Man of the World (New York: Vanguard Press, ), . . A letter from Cobb to his friend Robert Davis, dated September , , written from the Laurentian Club, Lac La Peche, Quebec, Canada. Crabbe Library, Eastern Kentucky University. . Cobb, ‘‘The Convict Who Made a Garden,’’ . Descriptions and dialogue reported in this chapter, as well as comments by Cobb, are drawn from this article unless otherwise indicated. . ‘‘Makes Prison Yard a Thing of Beauty,’’ New York Times, October , . . CC to CN, October , . . ‘‘To be sent up the river’’ is an American colloquialism that stems from Sing Sing’s riverbank location. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrases and Fables (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, ), . . CC to CN, October , ; The dialogue reported here and comments made by Cobb are all drawn from Cobb, ‘‘The Convict Who Made a Garden,’’ . . Cobb’s story about Sing Sing was ‘‘Local Color,’’ published in in a collection of stories by the same name. . CC to CN, October , . . Ibid. . CC to CN, June , , and June , . C : Y Census records, local histories, newspapers, and other sources confirm and clarify Chapin’s remembrances of his youth and fill in the many parts of the early past he never told. At times, the record of events did not match Chapin’s own account. In all such cases, I was, however, able to find an explanation for the discrepancy. For instance, Chapin believed he visited Wilbur Story in . It was more likely the visit occurred in late . That Chapin made this kind of mistake is not surprising considering he was in his sixties when he wrote the account of his life and had no written record to consult. [18.191.211.66] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 12:01 GMT) Two key pieces of documentary evidence were crucial in being able to reconstruct Chapin’s youth. The first was a massive pension file in the National Archives. Contained in it was considerable information about the many moves that the family made while Chapin was young. It also permitted me to eventually identify the ‘‘western town’’ in which Chapin first caught the newspaper bug. The second remarkable find was preserved copies of a newspaper that he published as a teenager. The fact that these papers still exist is a testament to the pack-rat nature of the United States and the wonders of the World Wide Web. It was through the latter that I discovered the American Private Press Association Library and the existence of four copies of Our...
