Chester Cobb was the son of Joseph Septimus Cobb, a chemist from Sheffield, England and his Geelong-born wife Rosalie Thomasina Kate Cockburn, nee Smith. Cobb left school early to become a cadet, and later a reporter, for the Sydney Daily Telegraph. After his mother's death in 1921, he received a small inheritance which he used to move to England, possibly intending to pursue a literary career. Allen and Unwin rejected several manuscripts before they accepted Mr Moffatt. That title and Days of Disillusion, published soon after, received numerous, generally favourable reviews, although they did not sell well. Cobb did some poultry farming before his novels were published. On 31 March 1924 he married Barbara Anne Convy, twenty years his senior. In 1938 he became a sub-editor for the Countryman, a quarterly rural review and miscellany.
Cobb's two novels were based on his experiences in Australia and events in his father's life. The spiritual journeys of the main characters reflect Cobb's own, which led him to question orthodox Christianity and turn to theosophy. He wrote a third unpublished novel. Colin Roderick, who included Cobb in 20 Australian Novelists (1947), claims that 'Mr Moffatt is a reasoned well-developed novel in the "stream of consciousness" tradition. As such it is a pioneer novel in that it reflects a mind coloured by an Australian urban environment.' According to Roderick's assessment of Days of Disillusion, Cobb successfully conveyed the conscious thought of 'Robert Watson'.
Stanley Tick, reassessing Cobb's fiction in 'Casebook for a Novelist: Chester Cobb' (Southerly 4, 1961, pp. 21-35) asserts that his subject's novels have not been given adequate critical attention because of the stream-of-consciousness technique, which was new in Australian writing. A second reason was the choice of subject matter, metaphysical insights, also foreign to Australian readers of fiction. On the cover of the Southerly number in which Tick's article appears, it is listed as 'Chester Cobb: An Unremembered Australian Novelist'.
