This section contains 5,745 words (approx. 20 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: Rogers, Tommy W. “Joseph B. Cobb: Antebellum Humorist and Critic.” Mississippi Quarterly 22, no. 2 (spring 1969): 131-46.
In the following essay, Rogers favorably assesses the contribution of Southwestern humorist Joseph B. Cobb.
Although Joseph B. Cobb is largely unknown today, at least one observer has evaluated him as one of the few antebellum Southern planters who wrote anything that properly belongs to literature.1 George T. Buckley, on discovering Cobb's Leisure Labors, was so impressed with the “range of learning and sound scholarship displayed on almost every page” that he felt this uncatalogued Mississippian “ought not to be forgotten in a state which H. L. Mencken was then declaring had never produced a printable manuscript.”2 William Carey Crane, a contemporary of Cobb, in an address before the Mississippi Historical Society in the House of Representatives at Jackson, cited Cobb's The Creole and Mississippi Scenes, and his “elegant contributions” to the...
This section contains 5,745 words (approx. 20 pages at 300 words per page) |