Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born on 24 June 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, into a large, poor farming family, and grew up there and in Indiana. When the Civil War began in 1861 he enlisted in the 9th Indiana Infantry. He fought at Shiloh and Chickamauga, worked as a topographical engineer drawing maps of the ground the army would fight over, and was badly wounded in the head at Kennesaw Mountain in 1864. The war gave him his subject. Much of his best fiction is about the moment of death and what the mind does in the seconds before it, and some of it, like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, is set on the battlefields he knew.

After the war he drifted west to San Francisco and into journalism. He spent three years in England in the early 1870s, then came back and made his name as a columnist, first for local papers and then, from 1887, for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. His columns were savage, funny and personal, and they earned him the nickname “Bitter Bierce.” The satirical definitions he published over many years were gathered as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906 and retitled The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911. That book is still the thing most people know him for.

His fiction is less widely read but more original. Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can Such Things Be? (1893) collect war stories and supernatural tales that are short, precise and often cruel, built to turn over completely in the last paragraph. He was fascinated by failures of perception: an invisible animal in The Damned Thing, a dead woman’s voice in The Moonlit Road, the lone figure of An Inhabitant of Carcosa wandering ruins he doesn’t recognise. “Carcosa” itself was borrowed by Robert W. Chambers for The King in Yellow and passed on from there.

The end of his life is a famous mystery. In late 1913, in his seventies, Bierce travelled into Mexico during the revolution, apparently intending to see the fighting. His last letters date from the end of that year, and nothing reliable is known of him afterward. The date and place of his death have never been established.

All eight Bierce stories on the site are short, and the two shortest take under ten minutes. The Boarded Window is a good place to start.