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.
Bierce was born at Horse Cave Creek in Meigs County, Ohio, to Marcus Aurelius Bierce (1799–1876) and Laura Sherwood Bierce.[2] 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.[2] 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, Ambrose, Arthur, Adelia, and Aurelia. He left home at age fifteen to become a "printer's devil" at a small Ohio newspaper.[2]
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,[4] 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.
Bierce married Mary Ellen "Mollie" Day on 25 December 1871. They had three children; two sons, Day (1872–1889)[5] and Leigh (1874–1901),[5] and a daughter, Helen (1875–1940). Both of Bierce's sons died before he did: Day committed suicide due to depression over a romantic rejection,[6] and Leigh died of pneumonia related to alcoholism.[5] Bierce separated from his wife in 1888 after discovering compromising letters to her from an admirer. They divorced in 1904[5] and Mollie Day Bierce died the following year.
On Bierce's religious views, he was an agnostic.[7]
Bierce suffered from lifelong asthma[8] as well as complications from his war wounds.[1]
Journalism
In San Francisco, Bierce received the rank of brevetmajor 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".[9][10] 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.
In 1887, he published a column called "Prattle" and became one of the first regular columnists and editorialists to be employed on William Randolph Hearst's newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner,[2] 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 loans from the U.S. government to build the First Transcontinental Railroad on gentle terms, but Collis P. Huntington persuaded a friendly member of Congress to introduce a bill excusing the companies from repaying the money, amounting to $130 million (nearly $3 billion in 2007 money).
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.[11]
Bierce's coverage and diatribes on the subject aroused such public wrath that the bill was defeated. Bierce returned to California in November.
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 PresidentWilliam McKinley when Hearst's opponents turned a poem Bierce had written about the assassination of Governor Goebel in 1900 into a cause célèbre.
Bierce meant his poem, written on the occasion of the assassination of Governor William Goebel of Kentucky, to express a national mood of dismay and fear, but after McKinley was shot in 1901 it seemed to foreshadow the crime:
The bullet that pierced Goebel's breast
Can not be found in all the West;
Good reason, it is speeding here
To stretch McKinley on his bier.
Hearst was thereby accused by rival newspapers—and by then Secretary of StateElihu Root—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 neither revealed Bierce as the author of the poem, nor fired him.[12]
Literary works
Bierce, 1892
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.
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 his much-quoted book, The Devil's Dictionary, originally an occasional newspaper item which was 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.
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.[13][14][15] After closing this letter by saying, "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination," he vanished without a trace, becoming one of the most famous disappearances in American literary history. Skeptic Joe Nickell argued that such a letter had never been found.[16][page needed] 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.[17] Again, Nickell[16][page needed] 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[16][page needed] 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.
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.
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 60 minutes. Another, shorter, version was released in 2006 by director Michael Barton and runs about 23 minutes.
American composer Rodney Waschka II composed an opera, Saint Ambrose, based on Bierce's life.[18]
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.[19] 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 Bottle”), 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". It was also alluded to by a sci-fi fiction site "The SCP Foundation: SCP-1084 - Damaged Mausoleum." Though the author himself is not named, things such as location, date of birth, and being a disappeared American author point to Bierce.[20]
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."[2]
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."[2]
Author Kurt Vonnegut once stated that he considered "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" the greatest American short story and a work of flawless American genius.[21][page needed]
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?" [22]
Works
Books
Bierce, Ambrose (1873), The Fiend's Delight (novella, short stories, poetry).
——— (1873), Nuggets and Dust Panned Out In California (stories, maxims, sketches, epigrams, quips, witticisms).
——— (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).
^Donald T. Blume (2004). "The Boarded Window". Ambrose Bierce's Civilians and soldiers in context: a critical study. Kent State University Press. p. 323. ISBN9780873387781. Contrary to McWilliams's claim, however, in the public arena Bierce was not merely an agnostic but a staunch unbeliever regarding the question of Jesus' divinity.((cite book)): |access-date= requires |url= (help)
^Vonnegut, Kurt, A Man Without a Country, pp. 7–8, And I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," by Ambrose Bierce. ...It is a flawless example of American genius...
^In 2009, The Library of America selected this story for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.
Bierce, Ambrose (2003), Joshi, ST; Shultz, David E (eds.), A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce, Ohio State University Press.
Bleiler, Everett (1948), The Checklist of Fantastic Literature, Chicago: Shasta Publishers, pp. 32, 147
Cozzens, Peter. 1996. "The Tormenting Flame: What Ambrose Bierce Saw in a Fire-Swept Thicket at Shiloh Haunted Him for the rest of his Life." Civil War Times Illustrated. April 1996. Volume XXXV (1). Pages 44-54.
De Castro, Adolphe (1929). Portrait of Ambrose Bierce (New York and London: Century).
O'Conner, Richard (1967). Ambrose Bierce: a Biography, with illustrations, Boston, Little, Brown and Company.
Floyd, E Randall (1999), The Good, the Bad, and the Mad: Some Weird People in American History, New York: Barnes & Noble, ISBN978-0-7607-6600-2.
Morris, Roy (1999) [1995], Ambrose Bierce: alone in bad company, US: Oxford University Press, ISBN978-0-19-512628-0.
