Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842 â€" circa 1914) was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. He wrote the short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and compiled a satirical lexicon, The Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic, his motto "Nothing matters", and the sardonic view of human nature that informed his work, all earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce".
Despite his reputation as a searing critic, Bierce was known to encourage younger writers, including poet George Sterling and fiction writer W. C. Morrow. Bierce employed a distinctive style of writing, especially in his stories. His style often embraces an abrupt beginning, dark imagery, vague references to time, limited descriptions, impossible events and the theme of war.
In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. While traveling with rebel troops, he disappeared without a trace.
p>
§Early life
Bierce was born in a log cabin at Horse Cave Creek in Meigs County, Ohio on June 24, 1842, to Marcus Aurelius Bierce (1799â€"1876) and Laura Sherwood Bierce. His mother was a descendant of William Bradford. His parents were a poor but literary couple who instilled in him a deep love for books and writing. The boy grew up in Kosciusko County, Indiana, attending high school at the county seat, Warsaw.
He was the tenth of thirteen children whose father gave all of them names beginning with the letter "A". In order of birth, the Bierce siblings were Abigail, Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert, and Ambrose. He left home at age fifteen to become a "printer's devil" at a small Ohio newspaper.
§Military career
At the outset of the American Civil War, Bierce enlisted in the Union Army's 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. He participated in the Operations in Western Virginia campaign (1861), was present at the "first battle" at Philippi and received newspaper attention for his daring rescue, under fire, of a gravely wounded comrade at the Battle of Rich Mountain. In February 1862 he was commissioned First Lieutenant, and served on the staff of General William Babcock Hazen as a topographical engineer, making maps of likely battlefields.
Bierce fought at the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862), a terrifying experience that became a source for several later short stories and the memoir "What I Saw of Shiloh". In June 1864, he sustained a serious head wound at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, and spent the rest of the summer on furlough, returning to active duty in September. He was discharged from the army in January 1865.
His military career resumed, however, when in mid-1866 he rejoined General Hazen as part of the latter's expedition to inspect military outposts across the Great Plains. The expedition proceeded by horseback and wagon from Omaha, Nebraska, arriving toward year's end in San Francisco, California.
§Personal life
Bierce married Mary Ellen "Mollie" Day on December 25, 1871. They had three children: two sons, Day (1872â€"1889) and Leigh (1874â€"1901), and a daughter, Helen (1875â€"1940). Both of Bierce's sons died before he did: Day committed suicide after a romantic rejection, and Leigh died of pneumonia related to alcoholism. Bierce separated from his wife in 1888, after discovering compromising letters to her from an admirer. They divorced in 1904; Mollie Day Bierce died the following year.
Bierce was an agnostic.
Bierce suffered from lifelong asthma as well as complications from his war wounds.
§Journalism
In San Francisco, Bierce received the rank of brevet major before resigning from the Army. He remained in San Francisco for many years, eventually becoming famous as a contributor and/or editor for a number of local newspapers and periodicals, including The San Francisco News Letter, The Argonaut, the Overland Monthly, The Californian and The Wasp. A selection of his crime reporting from The San Francisco News Letter was included in The Library of America anthology True Crime.
Bierce lived and wrote in England from 1872 to 1875, contributing to Fun magazine. His first book, The Fiend's Delight, a compilation of his articles, was published in London in 1873 by John Camden Hotten under the pseudonym "Dod Grile". Returning to the United States, he again took up residence in San Francisco. From 1879 to 1880, he traveled to Rockerville and Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, to try his hand as local manager for a New York mining company; when the company failed he returned to San Francisco and resumed his career in journalism. From January 1, 1881 until September 11, 1885 he was editor of The Wasp magazine, and in which he began a column called "Prattle". He also became one of the first regular columnists and editorialists to be employed on William Randolph Hearst's newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, eventually becoming one of the most prominent and influential among the writers and journalists of the West Coast. He remained associated with Hearst Newspapers until 1906.
§Railroad Refinancing Bill
The Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies had received large, low-interest loans from the U.S. government to build the First Transcontinental Railroad, but Collis P. Huntington persuaded a friendly member of Congress to introduce a bill excusing the companies from repaying the loans, amounting to $130 million (worth nearly $3 billion today).
In January 1896 Hearst dispatched Bierce to Washington, D.C. to foil this attempt. The essence of the plot was secrecy; the railroads' advocates hoped to get the bill through Congress without any public notice or hearings. When the angered Huntington confronted Bierce on the steps of the Capitol and told Bierce to name his price, Bierce's answer ended up in newspapers nationwide:
My price is one hundred thirty million dollars. If, when you are ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States.
Bierce's coverage and diatribes on the subject aroused such public wrath that the bill was defeated. Bierce returned to California in November.
§McKinley accusation
Because of his penchant for biting social criticism and satire, Bierce's long newspaper career was often steeped in controversy. On several occasions his columns stirred up a storm of hostile reaction which created difficulties for Hearst. One of the most notable of these incidents occurred following the assassination of President William McKinley, when Hearst's opponents turned a poem Bierce had written about the assassination of Governor William Goebel of Kentucky in 1900 into a cause célèbre.
Bierce meant his poem to express a national mood of dismay and fear, but after McKinley was shot in 1901, it seemed to foreshadow the crime:
Hearst was thereby accused by rival newspapersâ€"-and by then-Secretary of State Elihu Rootâ€"-of having called for McKinley's assassination. Despite a national uproar that ended his ambitions for the presidency (and even his membership in the Bohemian Club), Hearst did not reveal Bierce as the author of the poem or fire him.
§Literary works
Bierce was considered a master of pure English by his contemporaries, and virtually everything that came from his pen was notable for its judicious wording and economy of style. He wrote in a variety of literary genres.
His short stories are held among the best of the 19th century, providing a popular following based on his roots. He wrote realistically of the terrible things he had seen in the war in such stories as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", "The Boarded Window", "Killed at Resaca", and "Chickamauga".
In addition to his ghost and war stories, he also published several volumes of poetry. His Fantastic Fables anticipated the ironic style of grotesquerie that became a more common genre in the 20th century.
One of Bierce's most famous works is the much-quoted The Devil's Dictionary, originally an occasional newspaper item, first published in book form in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book. It consists of satirical definitions of English words which lampoon cant and political double-talk.
Under the entry "leonine", meaning a single line of poetry with an internal rhyming scheme, he included an apocryphal couplet written by the fictitious "Bella Peeler Silcox" (i.e. Ella Wheeler Wilcox) in which an internal rhyme is achieved in both lines only by mispronouncing the rhyming words:
Bierce's twelve-volume Collected Works were published in 1909, the seventh volume of which consists solely of The Devil's Dictionary, the title Bierce himself preferred to The Cynic's Word Book.
§Disappearance
In October 1913 Bierce, then aged 71, departed Washington, D.C., for a tour of his old Civil War battlefields. By December he had passed through Louisiana and Texas, crossing by way of El Paso into Mexico, which was in the throes of revolution. In Ciudad Juárez he joined Pancho Villa's army as an observer, and in that role he witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca.
Bierce is known to have accompanied Villa's army as far as the city of Chihuahua. His last known communication with the world was a letter he wrote there to Blanche Partington, a close friend, dated December 26, 1913. After closing this letter by saying, "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination," he vanished without a trace, his disappearance becoming one of the most famous in American literary history. Skeptic Joe Nickell argued that no letter had ever been found; all that existed was a notebook belonging to his secretary and companion, Carrie Christiansen, containing a rough summary of a purported letter and her statement that the originals had been destroyed.
Oral tradition in Sierra Mojada, Coahuila, documented by the priest James Lienert, states that Bierce was executed by firing squad in the town cemetery there. Again, Nickell finds this story to be rather incredible. He quotes Bierce's friend and biographer Walter Neale as saying that in 1913, Bierce had not ridden for quite some time, was suffering from serious asthma and had been severely critical of Pancho Villa. Neale concludes that it would have been highly unlikely for Bierce to have gone to Mexico and joined up with Villa.
All investigations into his fate have proven fruitless, and Nickell concedes that despite a lack of hard evidence that Bierce had gone to Mexico, there is also none that he had not. Therefore, despite an abundance of theories (including death by suicide), his end remains shrouded in mystery.
§Legacy and influence
At least three films have been made of Bierce's story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". A silent film version, The Bridge, was made in 1929. A French version called La Rivière du Hibou, directed by Robert Enrico, was released in 1962; this black-and-white film faithfully recounts the original narrative using voice-over. Another version, directed by Brian James Egen, was released in 2005.
The French version was aired in 1964 as one of the final episodes of the television series The Twilight Zone: "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". A copy of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" appeared in the ABC television series Lost ("The Long Con", airdate February 8, 2006). Prior to The Twilight Zone, the story had been adapted as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Another film adaptation was made of Bierce's story "Eyes of the Panther". To date at least two versions of this story exist on screen. One version was developed for Shelley Duvall's Nightmare Classics series and was released in 1990. This version runs about 60Â minutes. Another, shorter, version was released in 2006 by director Michael Barton and runs about 23Â minutes.
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" was also adapted for the CBS radio programs Suspense and Escape.
"The Damned Thing" was adapted into a Masters of Horror episode of the same title directed by Tobe Hooper.
American composer Rodney Waschka II composed an opera, Saint Ambrose, based on Bierce's life.
Bierce's disappearance has also been a popular topic. Carlos Fuentes's novel The Old Gringo is a fictionalized account of Bierce's disappearance which was later adapted into the film Old Gringo (1989), starring Gregory Peck in the title role. Bierce's disappearance and trip to Mexico provide the background for the vampire horror film From Dusk till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter (2000), in which Bierce's character plays a central role. Bierce's fate is the subject of Gerald Kersh's "The Oxoxoco Bottle" (aka “The Secret of the Bottleâ€), which appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on December 7, 1957, and was reprinted in the anthology Men Without Bones. Bierce reappears in the future on Mount Shasta in Robert Heinlein's novella, "Lost Legacy".
The short film "Ah! Silenciosa" (1999), starring Jim Beaver as Bierce, weaves elements of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" into a speculation on Bierce's disappearance.
The short story "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field," written by Bierce, is one of the first types of fiction that dealt with unexplainable, Twilight Zone-like themes. In this story, a man is seen crossing a field and then disappears from existence. Such a story could be thought of as a foreboding prophecy of his own unexplained disappearance. This short story would go on to be the inspiration for the famous David Lang disappearance often found in modern supernatural folklore.
Biographer Richard O'Conner argued that war unleashed the howling demons lurking in the pit of Bierce's soul: "War was the making of Bierce as a man and a writer. [From his grim experience, he became] truly capable of transferring the bloody, headless bodies and boar-eaten corpses of the battlefield onto paper."
Essayist Clifton Fadiman wrote: "Bierce was never a great writer. He has painful faults of vulgarity and cheapness of imagination. But... his style, for one thing, will preserve him; and the purity of his misanthropy, too, will help to keep him alive."
Author Alan Gullette argues that Bierce's war tales may be the best writing on war, outranking his contemporary Stephen Crane (author of The Red Badge of Courage) and even Ernest Hemingway.
Author Kurt Vonnegut once stated that he considered "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" the greatest American short story and a work of flawless American genius.
American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena Charles Fort wrote about the unexplained disappearances of Ambrose Bierce and Ambrose Small, and asked "Was somebody collecting Ambroses?"
Bierce was a major character in a series of mystery books written by Oakley Hall and published between 1998 and 2006.
§Works
§Books
- Bierce, Ambrose (1873), The Fiend's Delight (novella, short stories, poetry)Â .
- â€"â€"â€" (1873), Nuggets and Dust Panned Out In California (stories, maxims, sketches, epigrams, quips, witticisms) .
- â€"â€"â€" (1874), Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (stories, fables, poetry, maxims, sketches, epigrams, quips, witticisms) .
- Bierce, Ambrose; Arundel Harcourt, Thomas; Herman, William (1877), The Dance of Death (novella)Â .
- Bierce, Ambrose (1891), Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (short story collection)Â .
- Black Beetles in Amber (1892) (poetry)
- The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter (1892) (with Adolphe De Castro) (novella)
- Can Such Things Be? (1893) (short story collection)
- Fantastic Fables (1899) (short story collection)
- â€"â€"â€" (1903), Shapes of Clay (poetry) .
- â€"â€"â€" (1909), The shadow on the dial, and other essays (nonfiction), Archive .
- The Devil's Dictionary (1911) (first published in book form as The Cynic's Wordbook, 1906) (nonfiction)
- Collected Works (1909) (short story collection)
- Write It Right (1909) (nonfiction)
- A Horseman in the Sky, A Watcher by the Dead, The Man and the Snake (1920) (tales)
- A Vision of Doom: Poems by Ambrose Bierce (1980) (poetry)
- Civil War Stories (1994) (Sixteen stories from The Collected Works (1909))
§Selected short stories
§See also
- Fable
- John P. Irish, mentioned in Bierce's book, Black Beetles in Amber
- List of horror fiction authors
- List of people who have mysteriously disappeared
- The Old Gringo
§Notes
§References
§Further reading
- Ambrose Bierce Papers, 1872â€"1913 (2 linear ft.) are housed in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford University Libraries.
- The Ambrose Bierce Papers, ca. 1894â€"1913 and the Collection of Ambrose Bierce Papers, 1875â€"1925, bulk 1890â€"1913 are housed at The Bancroft Library.
- Nickell, J. (1992). Ambrose Bierce is missing and other historical mysteries. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.
§External links
- Works by Ambrose Bierce at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Ambrose Bierce at Internet Archive
- Works by Ambrose Bierce at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Ambrose Bierce at the Internet Movie Database
- The Ambrose Bierce Site
- The Ambrose Bierce Project
- Ambrose Bierce at PoetryFoundation.org
- The Devil's Dictionary hypertext at the University of Virginia
- Tales of Soldiers and Civilians
- One of Bierce's last letters
- Very Trustworthy Witnesses: The Many Deaths of Ambrose Bierce - Paris Review article on the many stories about Bierce's death