author
d. 1856
Frontier humor, river stories, and rough-edged American life all meet in these lively sketches by a 19th-century newspaper writer. Best known for comic tales of the Old Southwest, this author helped capture a rowdy corner of early American storytelling.
John S. Robb was a 19th-century American writer and journalist associated with St. Louis. A Minnesota Historical Society article about his letters describes him as having arrived in St. Louis in 1843 or 1844 and becoming assistant editor of the St. Louis Reveille in 1846, where he wrote as "Solitaire." His work is also noted by Oxford Reference, which describes him as a St. Louis journeyman printer and links him to the frontier-humor tradition.
Robb is best known for Streaks of Squatter Life, and Far-West Scenes (1847), a collection of humorous sketches, and for the material later gathered in The Swamp Doctor's Adventures in The South-West. Project Gutenberg describes that book as a mid-19th-century collection of humorous sketches centered on life in Louisiana and the broader Southwest, full of anecdote, character, and rough frontier comedy.
His surviving reputation rests on that vivid comic voice: tall tales, regional characters, and energetic scenes from early American life on the edge of settlement. Some catalog records identify him simply as "John S. Robb, -1856," which supports the death year you provided, but the sources found here did not offer a fuller confirmed life sketch beyond his newspaper work and books.