62 Ambrose Bierce (1842–c1914)
Gesina A. Phillips
Introduction
Biography
Ambrose Bierce is best known for his short stories, many of which combine the experience of the Civil War with psychologically or supernaturally uncanny events. He was also a cutting newspaper columnist, and his satirical mode is evident in works such as The Devil’s Dictionary. His satirical political writings earned him attention and no small degree of notoriety in his time, as well as the nickname “Bitter Bierce.”
Bierce was born to Marcus Aurelius and Laura Sherwood Bierce on a farm in Horse Cave Creek, Meigs County, Ohio, and moved to northern Indiana at an early age. After some years spent at an abolitionist paper (1857-1859), printer’s devil at the Northern Indianan), enrolled at the Kentucky Military Institute (1859-60), and working on the family farm, he enlisted in the Union Army in 1861. Bierce served until 1965, after being involved in several of the major battles of the Civil War, and achieved the rank of first lieutenant by the end of his time in uniform. After the war, Bierce worked as a Treasury aide and engineering attaché, traveling to Panama and throughout the western territories. In 1967, Bierce moved to San Francisco where he began his journalistic and literary career.
Bierce began to publish poetry, essays, and stories in this early period, while simultaneously taking on different roles (usually editor and columnist positions) at a string of newspapers. This dual role began to solidify his legacy as an acerbic commentator and prolific author. It was during his years in England following his marriage to Mary Ellen (Mollie) Day that Bierce began to publish his writing; under the pseudonym Dod Grile, he published The Fiend’s Delight (1873), Nuggets and Dust (1873), and Cobwebs from an Empty Shelf (1874).
The years following his return to the United States in 1965 were marked by a period of literary stagnancy, until 1881 when he joined the San Francisco Wasp as an editor and columnist and began to write the political satire column “Prattle” (which contained snippets that would later be incorporated into The Devil’s Dictionary). Bierce continued this column when in 1887 he began to write for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. Despite a staunch anti-war position (both personally and in “Prattle”) during the Spanish-American War which clashed with Hearst’s own publicized view, the two saw eye-to-eye on the issue of diminishing the power of railroad monopolies, and Bierce led Hearst’s lobby in Washington on this issue during the late 1890s.
Despite several personal tragedies between 1888 and 1905—his separation and subsequent divorce from his wife Mollie, the deaths of his sons, and Mollie’s death within the year of their divorce—Bierce’s literary career flourished during this period. The short story collection Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (which includes “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”) was first published in 1891, with the satirical poetr