From Place to Place

Nine stories make up this 1920 collection by Irvin S. Cobb, the Kentucky humorist and newspaperman whose fiction mined the manners of small-town America. The book opens with “The Gallowsmith,” a portrait of an aging public hangman named Uncle Tobe who treats execution as an ordinary trade, then moves through pieces such as “Boys Will Be Boys,” “Quality Folks,” and “The Bull Called Emily.” Cobb’s range runs from broad comedy to real pathos, often turning on a single object (a broken shoelace, a lucky charm, a stubborn animal) to show how ordinary people give themselves away. The stories mix regional color with a sharp eye for character, and they show the sort of writing that once made Cobb one of the most widely read storytellers in America.