Author, journalist, after-dinner speaker, lecturer, radio personality, screenwriter, and Hollywood actor, Irvin S. Cobb was one of the most versatile and successful humorists of his day. Widely praised for his witty newspaper columns and magazine essays, the creator of the lovable Kentucky character Judge Priest wrote hundreds of short stories and almost sixty books, roughly half of them humorous. In his own time Cobb was a national celebrity whose work was favorably compared with Mark Twain's, but it is little known today and deserves reexamination.

Like Twain, Cobb grew up in a small town with Southern sympathies and drew on an idealized childhood in creating his best fiction. He was born and raised in Paducah, Kentucky, where his family had long been settled; his father had served with the Confederate army. As a child he read widely, balancing the classics with Sir Walter Scott, Sut Lovingood yarns, and...