In the Midst of Life was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1898 as a revised and expanded edition of Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (E.L.G. Steele, San Francisco, 1891). The collection is divided into two sections: “Soldiers” and “Civilians,” and it contains the core of Bierce’s achievement as a fiction writer.
The war stories — drawn from Bierce’s own service as a Union soldier who fought at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and dozens of other engagements — are unlike anything else in American Civil War literature. Where Stephen Crane (who had never seen combat) rendered war as an experience of confusion and fear in The Red Badge of Courage, Bierce (who had seen it extensively) renders it as an experience of horror, irony, and absurdity. “Chickamauga” follows a deaf-mute child who wanders onto a battlefield and mistakes the wounded and dying soldiers for playmates; the child’s incomprehension makes the carnage more, not less, appalling. “A Horseman in the Sky” presents a Union soldier who must shoot his own father — a Confederate cavalryman — and does so with a calm that is more disturbing than any expression of anguish.
The civilian stories are psychological tales of terror: haunted houses, guilt-driven madness, encounters with the inexplicable. Bierce’s technique in both sections is similar: compressed prose, ironic distance, and endings that deliver their impact through revelation or reversal rather than emotional crescendo.
Collecting In the Midst of Life
First edition as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (E.L.G. Steele, San Francisco, 1891): Cloth.
First edition as In the Midst of Life (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1898): Cloth.
Market values:
- Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, first edition, fine: $1,000–$3,000
- Very good: $400–$1,000
- In the Midst of Life (Putnam’s), first edition, fine: $200–$500