Though Irvin S. Cobb was an accomplished reporter of straight news, he is mainly remembered in present-day journalistic circles for his contributions as a humor columnist. Much of his surviving humor copy was done between 1904 and 1911, the period during which he worked as a reporter and humor columnist for two major New York City newspapers. Cobb had entered newspaper journalism in his hometown at age sixteen and worked for Kentucky papers until 1904, when he left his native state for the "big city." After getting out of newspapering in 1911, he concentrated on writing humor articles and short stories for the magazine market--notably the Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan--and in addition had more than sixty books published.

Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb was born in 1876 in the rollicking frontier town of Paducah, Kentucky, into a family whose descendants were among the first settlers of that state--"a story stiff with proud...