Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce was the darkest, the most savage, and the most psychologically modern American writer of the Gilded Age — a man who saw combat in some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, who spent the rest of his life translating that experience into fiction and journalism of unsparing honesty, and who produced, in his Civil War stories and his Devil’s Dictionary, two bodies of work that have outlasted the more celebrated productions of his contemporaries. He was called “Bitter Bierce” and “the wickedest man in San Francisco,” and he cultivated both reputations with the relentless precision of a man who had looked at death too closely to be impressed by anything else. His disappearance into revolutionary Mexico in 1913 — at the age of seventy-one, riding south into the chaos of the Mexican Revolution and never seen again — provided the perfect ending to a life that was, from beginning to end, an argument against sentimentality.

Shiloh and Chickamauga

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, the youngest of thirteen children, all of whose names began with the letter A. His family was poor, his education was minimal, and his early life was unremarkable until, at nineteen, he enlisted in the Ninth Indiana Infantry and went to war.

Bierce fought at Shiloh, Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, and Franklin — some of the most terrible battles of the war. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant, promoted to first lieutenant, and suffered a serious head wound at Kennesaw Mountain in 1864 that ended his military service. The war gave him the subject of his greatest fiction and the sensibility that informed everything he wrote: a conviction that human life was fundamentally brutal, that most human aspirations were self-deluding, and that the only honest response to existence was a cold, precise, unflinching clarity.

The War Stories

Bierce’s Civil War stories — collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891, later retitled In the Midst of Life) — are the finest American war fiction before Hemingway and the most technically innovative short stories written in America before the twentieth century.

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) is the most famous: the story of a Confederate sympathiser about to be hanged from a bridge who experiences, in the instant before death, an elaborate hallucination of escape. The story’s final sentence — revealing that the escape was imaginary, that Peyton Farquhar is dead, swinging beneath Owl Creek bridge — was a narrative shock that had no precedent in American fiction and that anticipated the unreliable narration and perspectival experimentation of modernist fiction by a quarter century.

“Chickamauga” (1889) was the most devastating: a deaf-mute child wanders onto a battlefield and plays among the wounded and dying soldiers, unable to understand what he sees, until he returns home to find his mother dead, killed by a shell. The story’s power lay in the gap between the child’s innocent perception and the reader’s horrified comprehension.

The Devil’s Dictionary

The Devil’s Dictionary (1911, originally published in parts as The Cynic’s Word Book, 1906) was Bierce’s masterpiece of sustained invective — a satirical dictionary that defined words with a savage precision that made conventional definitions seem dishonest. “POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.” “CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.” “YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.” The definitions were not merely witty; they constituted a comprehensive, systematic demolition of American pieties — democracy, religion, marriage, progress, patriotism — conducted with the intellectual rigour of a philosopher and the emotional temperature of a man who had seen too much to believe in anything.

San Francisco

Bierce spent the most productive decades of his career in San Francisco, where he was the city’s most feared journalist — the literary dictator of the Pacific Coast, whose column in the San Francisco Examiner (published by William Randolph Hearst) could make or destroy reputations. He was a brilliant prose stylist, an exacting editor, and a cruel critic, and his influence on the development of San Francisco’s literary culture was immense.

The Disappearance

In 1913, Bierce — seventy-one years old, in failing health, and tired of life — traveled to Mexico, which was in the grip of the Revolution. He attached himself to Pancho Villa’s army as an observer and wrote his last known letter from Chihuahua on December 26, 1913. He was never heard from again. His fate has been the subject of endless speculation — execution, combat death, suicide — and remains one of the unsolved mysteries of American literary history. Carlos Fuentes’s novel The Old Gringo (1985) was a fictional imagining of Bierce’s final days.

Collecting Bierce

Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (E. L. G. Steele, San Francisco, 1891) is the primary target and a scarce book. The Devil’s Dictionary (Neale, 1911), under its original title The Cynic’s Word Book (Doubleday, 1906), is also collected. The twelve-volume Collected Works (Neale, 1909–1912) is the most complete edition and is sought by serious collectors. San Francisco imprints are preferred. Bierce signed and inscribed books freely, and association copies with literary figures command strong prices.