Authors

Scholarship and criticism on Ambrose Bierce has recently made significant strides in catching up to the significance and complexities of its subject, beginning with an exciting new set of editions and an authoritative critical study. The Short Fiction of Ambrose Bierce, 2 Volumes: A Comprehensive Edition (2006) is edited by S. T. Joshi, Lawrence I. Berkove, and David E. Schultz and fulfills a long-unmet need. Ambrose Bierce: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources, is edited by Joshi and Schultz (1999). Joshi and Schultz have also produced The Fall of the Republic and Other Political Stories and The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary (2000) and A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce (2003). Phantoms of a Blood- Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce, is edited by Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster (2002). Daniel Lindley edited Ambrose Bierce Takes on the Railroad: The Journalist as Muckraker and Cynic (1999). Robert C. Evans has brought out Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’: An Annotated Critical Edition (2003) and Joshi The Collected Fables of Ambrose Bierce (2000). Bierce’s poetry is found in Poems of Ambrose Bierce, ed. M. E. Grenander (1996). Robert L. Gale’s carefully surveys Bierce’s life and work in An Ambrose Bierce Companion (2001). Lawrence I. Berkove’s long-awaited critical study, A Prescription for Adversity: The Moral Art of Ambrose Bierce (2002), takes issue with simplistic clichés about Bierce’s famous pessimism and focuses upon his complex artistry and moral argument. Bierce’s war writings are the focus of another book, Ambrose Bierce’s Civilians and Soldiers in Context: A Critical Study, by Donald T. Blume (2004). S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz’s A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography (1999) is also useful. The fullest edition of Bierce’s writings is still Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (1909–12), edited by Walter Neale. The largest collection of Bierce’s letters is available in Bertha C. Pope’s edition of The Letters of Ambrose Bierce (1921). Until Berkove’s Prescription for Adversity, the standard critical biography was Paul Fatout’s Ambrose Bierce, the Devil’s Lexicographer (1951); Mary Elizabeth Grenander’s Ambrose Bierce (1971) is also still much worth consulting. Roy Morris Jr.’s Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company (1996) enriches our understanding of Bierce’s Civil War experience and how he converted this experience into a group of fine short stories. Still a fine critical study of Bierce’s work is Cathy N. Davidson’s The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce: Structuring the Ineffable (1984). Davidson also edited Critical Essays on Ambrose Bierce (1982). Two interesting essay perspectives on stories included in NAAL are “ ‘A Quarter of an Hour’: Hanging as Ambrose Bierce and Peyton Farquhar Knew It,” by Donald T. Blume, American Literary Realism (2002), and “ ‘Chickamauga’ as an Indian-Wars Narrative: The Relevance of Ambrose Bierce for a First-Nations-Centered Study of the Nineteenth Century,” by Susan Kalter, Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory (2000).

Ambrose Bierce led an unhappy childhood in Ohio and left home as a bitter and pessimistic young man. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Bierce joined the Union Army; he later brought his military experience vividly to life in some of his best stories. Bierce moved to San Francisco after the war and embarked on a career as a journalist. His "Prattler" column, originally printed in the Argonaut and then the Wasp, was picked up by William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Sunday Examiner in 1886 and provided Bierce with an excellent outlet for his biting wit and many of his most famous short stories. After divorcing his wife in 1891 and losing one son in a gunfight and the other to alcoholism, Bierce disappeared in Mexico in 1913, where legend says he was killed in the revolutionary war. His works include Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891; later retitled In the Midst of Life) and The Devil's Dictionary (1906).