page_title: Irvin S. Cobb
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Irvin S. Cobb / Biography / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: American writer and journalist Irvin S. Cobb (1876-1944) by Tony Sarg (1880-1942). 1 drawing: India ink over pencil, with watercolor, and scraping out on illustration board, 57.8 x 49.4 cm. (sheet). Published as illustration in: "The Glory of the States: Kentucky" by Irvin S. Cobb, "The American Magazine", May, 1916. Library of Congress description: "Author and journalist Irvin S. Cobb appears in a bust-length caricature, framed within a circle. Wearing a coonskin cap and fringed frontier outfit, he smokes a cigar and holds a rifle. A small vignette below the portrait, enclosed in a cartouche, shows two men, presumably native Kentuckians, shaking hands."
context_page_description: Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb was an American author, humorist, editor and columnist from Paducah, Kentucky, who relocated to New York in 1904, living there for the remainder of his life. He wrote for the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, as the highest paid staff reporter in the United States.
  Cobb also wrote more than 60 books and 300 short stories. Some of his works were adapted for silent movies. Several of his Judge Priest short stories were adapted in the 1930s for two feature films directed by John Ford.
context_section_description: Cobb has been described as having a round shape, bushy eyebrows, full lips, and a triple chin, with a cigar always hanging from his mouth.
  He married the former Laura Spencer Baker of Savannah, Georgia. Their daughter, Elizabeth Cobb (born 1902), was also an author.  She published the novel She Was a Lady and the nonfiction My Wayward Parent (1945), a book about her father.  Her first husband was Frank Michler Chapman, Jr., son of the ornithologist Frank Michler Chapman.
  Cobb's granddaughter was Buff Cobb, a television actress of the early 1950s. She married journalist Mike Wallace as his second wife.
  
  Cobb was honored in 1915 with the march "The War Correspondent" by G. E. Holmes, published by the John Church Company.
  Cobb was inducted into the Kentucky Writers' Hall of Fame on February 2, 2017.
  When Cobb died in New York City in 1944, his body was sent to Paducah for cremation.  His ashes were placed under a dogwood tree.  The granite boulder marking his remains is inscribed "Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb 1876-1944 Back Home".
  Cobb wrote a letter detailing his desired funeral arrangements. The document reads in part:
  Above all I want no long faces and no show of grief at the burying ground. Kindly observe the final wishes of the undersigned and avoid reading the so-called Christian burial service which, in view of the language employed in it, I regard as one of the most cruel and paganish things inherited by our forebears from our remote pagan ancestors. In deference to the faith of our dear mother who was through her lifetime a loyal though never bigoted communicant of that congregation, perhaps the current pastor of the First Presbyterian Church would consent to read the Twenty-third Psalm, which was her favorite passage in the Scriptures and is mine since it contains no charnel words, no morbid mouthings about corruption and decay and, being mercifully without creed or dogma, carries no threat of eternal hell-fire for those parties we do not like, no direct promise of a heaven which, if one may judge by the people who are surest of going there, must be a powerfully dull place, populated to a considerable and uncomfortable degree by prigs, time-servers and unpleasantly aggressive individuals. Hell may have a worse climate but undoubtedly the company is sprightlier. The Catholics, with their genius for stage-management, handle this detail better. The officiating clergyman speaks in Latin and the parishioners, being unacquainted with that language are impressed by the majesty of the rolling, sonorous periods without being shocked by tressing allusions and harrowing references.
caption: Irvin S. Cobb wearing a coonskin cap and smoking a cigar.
  Illustration by Tony Sarg for "The Glory of the States: Kentucky" by Irvin S. Cobb, published in The American Magazine for May 1916.
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