Ambrose Bierce
1842–1914 24 entries
Biography
Ambrose Bierce was an American writer, journalist and satirist, known for his biting wit and his dark stories of war. Born in Ohio in 1842, the tenth of thirteen children of a poor farming family, he grew up in Indiana. When the Civil War broke out he enlisted in the Union army, fought at Shiloh and Chickamauga, and in 1864 was badly wounded in the head at Kennesaw Mountain. After the war he settled in San Francisco, where his merciless newspaper columns earned him the nickname Bitter Bierce.
His short stories, among them An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, drew on what he had seen in battle and are counted among the finest American tales of war and the supernatural. For a quarter of a century he wrote ironic definitions of everyday words for the newspapers, and in 1906 he collected them as The Cynic’s Word Book, retitled The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911. He outlived both his sons and his marriage, and late in 1913, at the age of seventy-one, he went to Mexico to see its revolution at first hand. His last known letter is dated 26 December of that year, and nothing certain has ever been learned of his fate.
- Aphorisms 24