Sundry Accounts

Ten stories of small-town American life make up this 1922 collection, Irvin S. Cobb’s blend of broad comedy and quieter drama. It opens with “Darkness,” about a man who keeps his house blazing with light day and night, unable to face the dark after killing someone years before. Other pieces turn toward the comic, carried by Cobb’s newspaperman’s ear for dialect, gossip, and the small vanities of rank and reputation. Some characters are chased by their pasts through the towns that know them; others simply supply the laughs. Cobb was one of the most widely read writers of his day, a Kentucky humorist often set beside Mark Twain in the tradition of Southern and frontier storytelling. It is a good introduction for readers curious about early twentieth-century American humor and regional fiction.