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  • Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of an American Humorist by William E. Ellis
  • Daniel J. Burge (bio)
Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of an American Humorist. By William E. Ellis. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017. 274 pp.

Posthumous fame has been one of the most difficult things for American humorists to obtain. Reflecting on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars can note a long list of individuals who entertained hundreds of thousands of citizens and who gained national fame through their published books, only to die and quickly fade from popular memory. Writers such as David Ross Locke, Robert Henry Newell, Francis Miriam Whitcher, Mortimer Thomson, James Montgomery Bailey, and Charles Heber Clark were household names in the nineteenth century. They created iconic characters such as Petroleum V. Nasby and the Widow Bedott, whose sayings and doings caused merriment throughout the nation. However, upon their deaths they were largely forgotten. In Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of an American Humorist, William E. Ellis seeks to revivify another neglected writer. Building on the fact that Cobb, although immensely popular in the 1920s and 1930s, remains virtually unknown and unread today, Ellis uses this excellent biography to introduce Cobb to readers in the twenty-first century and to forcefully argue that Cobb deserves to be remembered and read. [End Page 273]

Throughout his study, Ellis builds the case that Cobb was one of the premier short-story writers and journalists of his generation. Cobb began his career as an editor of a small-town paper in Paducah, Kentucky, but he was to end it by hosting the Academy Awards and seeing his short stories turned into Hollywood films under the direction of John Ford. Ellis focuses his attention on Cobb's meteoric rise as a journalist and on the works that made him popular. Cobb left Kentucky in 1904 and moved to New York, where he began to write for the Evening World and later the Saturday Evening Post. Mixing humorous squibs with serious journalism, Cobb built a national readership and finally found his "gold mine" when he created the character of Judge Priest in 1911 (48). Over the next twenty-five years, Cobb would continue to crank out Judge Priest stories, which featured the stalwart Judge Priest, his fawning African American servant, and a host of local characters from Kentucky. The Judge Priest stories are examples of local color fiction, and Cobb excelled at feeding his audiences stories that portrayed a South peopled by honest, if not always shrewd, southerners. Cobb's popularity would dip in the late 1930s, but for nearly three decades he remained one of the most recognizable writers in the United States.

Ellis's work, however, fails to live up to its title. While Ellis does an admirable job of capturing the intriguing life of Irvin S. Cobb, he does little to establish his reputation as a humorist or to show why Cobb deserves to be remembered as a humorist and not as a journalist or short-story writer. For instance, Cobb published two humorous works early in his career that established his reputation as a humorist: Roughing It De Luxe (1913) and Speaking of Operations (1915). Roughing It De Luxe was a satirical travelogue that mirrored Mark Twain's Roughing It. Apart from a cursory summary of the individual chapters (61-63), Ellis fails to delve into the work. There is no explanation as to how this work built on Twain's travelogues, nor is there an examination as to how Cobb fit into the broader category of southwestern humorists. Early in his biography Ellis notes that "Southern humor of the Sut Lovingood variety penned by George Washington Harris permeated Cobb's thinking and writing throughout his career" (6), but Ellis never explores that connection. Ellis's analysis of Speaking of Operations is equally lackluster, as he merely cites several historians and critics who praise the literary merits of the work (81-82). The reader looking to understand why Cobb was popular, how he developed as a local color humorist, or how he differed from other humorists of his generation will doubtlessly be disappointed by this...

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