Ambrose Bierce

Who Was Ambrose Bierce?

Ambrose Bierce was the most mordant and unsparing satirist in American literature — a journalist, short story writer, and cynic whose experience of the Civil War produced a vision of human nature so dark that it has never entirely found its proper place in the American literary canon, which prefers its realism with a residue of hope. Born in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio, he enlisted in the Union Army at nineteen and served with distinction through some of the war’s bloodiest engagements, including Shiloh and Chickamauga. What he saw there stayed with him for the rest of his life.

His two most important story collections — Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can Such Things Be? (1893) — established him as the master of the short story of horror and irony. His most famous story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” is a masterpiece of narrative technique and psychological horror. The Devil’s Dictionary (1906/1911) is one of the great works of American satirical prose.

In 1913, at the age of seventy-one, Bierce traveled to Mexico to observe Pancho Villa’s revolution and was never heard from again. The mystery of his disappearance is as fitting an ending as a man of his temperament could have devised.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Tales of Soldiers and Civilians — 1891 — stories
• Can Such Things Be? — 1893 — stories
• The Devil's Dictionary — 1906/1911
• An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge — 1890 — story