Fishhead: The Darker Tales of Irvin S. Cobb Paperback - 2016

During his lifetime Irvin S. Cobb was one of the most celebrated writers in American literature, though nowadays he is almost forgotten, apart perhaps from his Lovecraft connection. Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb was born in Paducah, Kentucky on the 23rd June, 1876. His father, unable to cope with the death of his own father, succumbed to alcoholism when Cobb was only sixteen. As a result, Cobb's education came to an end and he started work, first on the Paducah Daily News, then the Louisville Evening Post. By 1904 Cobb's career in journalism was doing so well that he moved to New York, where he would go on to spend the rest of his life, starting work at the Evening Sun, though it wasn't long before an assignment to cover the Russian-Japanese peace conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire so impressed Joseph Pulitzer that he offered Cobb a job at the New York World, where he became the highest-paid staff reporter in the United States. In 1911 Cobb moved to the Saturday Evening Post. Three years later he was asked to cover the Great War. Amongst the many stories he wrote while there were the exploits of the Harlem Hellfighters, a unit of black American soldiers who had gone on to earn distinction for their courage and discipline, which Cobb celebrated in his book The Glory of the Coming. Besides writing and journalism, Cobb's career extended to Hollywood, where legendary director, John Ford, made two films based on his books: Judge Priest (1934) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953). Other films included Peck's Bad Boy (1921), starring Jackie Coogan, and The Woman Accused (1933), with a young Cary Grant. Cobb also did a stint at acting himself, appearing in ten movies altogether, including Pepper, Everybody's Old Man (1936), Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) and Hawaii Calls (1938).