A man has to be not only famous but well-beloved before the little facts of his biography become known to any one but his mother and his aunts. Voltaire and Rousseau are useful persons to whom to refer when you are dragged to a talk-party, but you feel no burning curiosity as to where they were born or what editorial page saw their first effusions. It is Robert Louis Stevenson whose home in Samoa you photograph; whose refuge in Monterey you visit. And so it is with Irvin S. Cobb, who is three things: a big reporter, a big writer, and a big man. If there is a newspaperman in New York who says that he doesn’t know that Cobb was born in Paducah, Kentucky, in 1876; that his first newspaper work was on the _Paducah Daily News_, that he did the Goebel murder trial, moved to Louisville, came to New York and stole a job on the _Evening Sun_, then that newspaperman is one of the I-knew-him-when club, whose family name is Legion and whose middle name is occasionally Liar. To be a New York newspaperman it is necessary to know Doc Perry’s and the fact that Cobb was born in Paducah. There’s a reason for it other than the fact that Cobb is a big writer and a well-beloved man. That is: Cobb has made Paducah, and all the other Paducahs--in Kentucky, and Minnesota, and California, and Vermont--from which the rest of us came, live for us, in fiction which gets us as no foreign tale ever can. He makes one smell the soil--a thing that has been said of him so often that it is a platitude. Covering the Portsmouth Peace Conference for the _Sun_, writing humorous stuff for the _Evening World_, making a national reputation for straight reporting with his account of the Thaw trial, Irvin Cobb had developed into a good, dependable star reporter when suddenly he broke away and in a story in the _Saturday Evening Post_, a story called “The Escape of Mr. Trimm,” he made himself known as a probable genius. No one could tell, yet, but in that story, the dramatic structure of it, the words like sparks from a third-rail in a snow-storm, the intensity with which the author saw himself as the chief character of the tale, there was evidenced a new American genius. Lord knows we needed him. We had--we still have--been letting England and France and Kulturland beat us ten to one in fiction. We had--we still have--a number of expert penmen who could do well with a wealthy young Yale grad. in a motor car; others, largely feminine, who could cheer our hearts with sweet stories about the Little Woman Who Always Smiled. But where were the writers who could go out on the street, really see the folks going by, and present them truthfully and interestingly in fiction? With one lone short story, Cobb had elected himself as one member of that missing and much needed class of geniuses.