Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (June 23, 1876 – March 11, 1944) 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.

"[2] Cobb was educated in public and private elementary schools, and then entered William A. Cade's Academy intending to pursue a law career.

His anecdotal memoir-cum-autobiography, Exit Laughing, published in 1941, includes a firsthand account of the assassination of Kentucky Governor William Goebel in 1900 and the trials of the killers.

His dispatches from the negotiations, emphasizing the personalities involved (including President Theodore Roosevelt), were published across the country with the title "Making Peace at Portsmouth."

After a second visit to France to cover the Great War, Cobb publicized the achievements of the unit known as the Harlem Hellfighters, most notably, Croix de Guerre recipients Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts.

The three-page article and half-page photograph reached a national audience of more than two million readers, and was widely reprinted in the black press.

After the repeal of Prohibition, Frankfort Distilleries recruited him to compile a recipe book[8] to remind consumers who were out of practice how to mix a good drink.

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.

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.

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.

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 distressing allusions and harrowing references.

Joel Chandler 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.

[13] The former was described by Lovecraft as "banefully effective in its portrayal of unnatural affinities between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of an isolated lake" in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature.