Cobb was the second of four children born to Kentucky natives in Paducah, Kentucky. His grandfather Reuben Saunders, M.D., is credited with discovering in 1873 that hypodermic use of morphine-atropine halted cholera. Cobb was raised in Paducah, where the events and people of his childhood became the basis for much of his later works.

Cobb was educated in public and private elementary schools and then entered William A. Cade's Academy intending to pursue a law career. When he was 16, his grandfather died and his father became an alcoholic. Forced to quit school and find work, he began his writing career.

Writing career

He started in journalism on the Paducah Daily News at age seventeen, and became the nation's youngest managing news editor at nineteen. He later worked at the Louisville Evening Post for a year and a half.

His firsthand account in Exit Laughing, details the saga of the Kentucky Governor William Goebel, who killed a man, exploited the split Democratic Party in Kentucky, and was assassinated in 1900.

Moving to New York in 1904, Cobb was hired by the Evening Sun. It sent him to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to cover the Russian-Japanese peace conference. His dispatches from the negotiations, focusing on the personalities involved (including President Theodore Roosevelt) were published across the country under the title "Making Peace at Portsmouth". They earned him a job offer from Joseph Pulitzer's New York World that made him the highest-paid staff reporter in the United States.

Cobb covered World War I for the Saturday Evening Post, and wrote a book in 1915 about his experiences called Paths of Glory. He wrote numerous series in periodicals and also collaborated on dramatic productions.

Hollywood

Several of Cobb's stories were made into silent films. He also wrote the screen titles for a couple more, including the Jackie Coogan vehicle Peck's Bad Boy (1921). When sound came in, more of his stories were adapted into films, including The Woman Accused (1933), starring a young Cary Grant.

John Ford twice made films based on Cobb's Judge Priest stories: Judge Priest (1934), featuring Will Rogers in the title role, and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), based on the short stories "The Sun Shines Bright", "The Mob from Massac", and "The Lord Provides".

Cobb also had an acting career, appearing in 10 films between 1932 and 1938, with starring roles in such movies as Pepper and Everybody's Old Man (1936). He was host of the 6th Academy Awards in 1935.

Personal life

Cobb has been described as having a round shape, bushy eyebrows, full lips, a triple chin, and always having a cigar in his mouth.

He married Laura Spencer Baker of Savannah, Georgia.

His daughter Elizabeth Cobb (born 1902) was an author in her own right. She published the novel She Was a Lady and 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 TV personality of the early 1950s, and second wife of journalist Mike Wallace.

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-calledChristian burial service which, in view of the language employed in it, I regard as oneof the most cruel and paganish things inherited by our forebears from our remote paganancestors. In deference to the faith of our dear mother who was through her lifetime aloyal though never bigoted communicant of that congregation, perhaps the currentpastor 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 charnelwords, no morbid mouthings about corruption and decay and, being mercifullywithout creed or dogma, carries no threat of eternal hell-fire for those parties we do notlike, no direct promise of a heaven which, if one may judge by the people who aresurest of going there, must be a powerfully dull place, populated to a considerable anduncomfortable degree by prigs, time-servers and unpleasantly aggressive individuals.Hell may have a worse climate but undoubtedly the company is sprightlier. TheCatholics, with their genius for stage-management, handle this detail better. Theofficiating clergyman speaks in Latin and the parishioners, being unacquainted withthat language are impressed by the majesty of the rolling, sonorous periods withoutbeing shocked by tressing allusions and harrowing references."

Cobb is best remembered for his humorous stories of Kentucky local color. These stories were first collected in the book Old Judge Priest (1915), whose title character was based on a prominent West Kentucky judge named William Pitman Bishop. Among his other books of humor are Speaking of Operations (1916) and Red Likker (1929).

Joel Harris wrote of these tales, "Cobb created a South peopled with honorable citizens, charming eccentrics, and loyal, subservient blacks, but at their best the Judge Priest stories are dramatic and compelling, using a wealth of precisely rendered detail to evoke a powerful mood."

Cobb also wrote short stories in a horror vein, such as "Fishhead" (1911) and "The Unbroken Chain" (1923). "Fishhead" has been cited as an inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, while "The Unbroken Chain" was a model for Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls".