Biography - Ambrose Bierce 1842-1914

Ambrose Bierce 1842-1914

In 1914, when he was seventy-one, Ambrose Bierce left the United States to report on the Mexican Revolution as an observer with the, rebel army of Pancho Villa.  One month after he arrived he wrote to a friend, "Pray for me—real hard." Shortly afterward Bierce disappeared, never to be seen again, and his mysterious fate has fascinated his biographers and his readers almost as much as the details of his misanthropic life.  Bierce was born the child of poor farmers at Horse Cave Creek, Meigs County, in southeast Ohio.  When he was four his family moved to a farm in Indiana, where he went to school.  His parents' religious fervor left him with a lifelong hatred of faith and piety; his unhappy childhood is partially reflected in his stories filled with deaths, maimings, and the separations of parents, children, and families.

When Bierce was fifteen he went to work as a printer's devil (apprentice) on an antislavery newspaper in Indiana.  Later he attended the Kentucky Military Institute for a year.  And in 1861, with the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted in the Union Army.  Bierce served with distinction throughout the war, rising from the rank of private to lieutenant and finally, to the rank of brevet major, He re-enlisted twice and fought in some of the greatest and bloodiest battles of the war: Shiloh, Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge.

Following the war, Bierce went west, first working in the San Francisco Mint but gradually establishing a career as a journalist, polemicist, and fiction writer.  He spent the years from 1872 to 1876 in London, where his slashing brand of journalism won him fame and the title "Bitter Bierce.”  But he returned to California to write for William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner.  Bierce's writing, especially his fiction, was sardonic and obsessed with death.  It has been said that "Death" was perhaps "his only character".  In fact, the idea of death was not only central to Bierce's writing, it dominated his life.  His early and crucial experiences in the Civil War had brought him face to face with a horrible and futile slaughter that had destroyed his youthful, romantic optimism.  And in his later life Bierce was tortured by personal and professional disasters: friends and relatives fought bitterly with him; became estranged, committed suicide, died tragically.  He grew increasingly cynical and malevolent, his writing vitriolic, filled with invective.

Excerpts from his popular Devil's Dictionary appeared from 1881 to 1906; it was a collection of waspish, witty epigrams and definitions that reflected the tone and flavor of much of his work.  He defined "bride" as "a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her"; "Christian" as one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor"; "birth" as The first and direst of all disasters." From 1867 until his disappearance, Bierce was a major figure in the development of American literal); realism.  He wrote essays, short stories, and major journalistic pieces.  He was called a 'West Coast Samuel Johnson," and his cynical and scathing newspaper articles were enormously popular But his finest achievement is found in his short stories, tales about men trapped in the labyrinths of endless struggle, blinded by folly and romantic hope, abandoned to ,a cold and brutal providence.

FURTHER READING: Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, 12 vols., ed.  W.  Neale, 1909-1912; Ambrose Bierce: Skepticism and Dissent, ed.  L.  Berkove, 1980; The Letters of Ambrose Bierce, ed.

B. Pope, 1922, 1967; V.  Starrett, Ambrose Bierce, 1920; C.  Grattan, Bitter Bierce, 1929;

C. McWilliams, Ambrose Bierce: A Biography, 1929, 1967; P.  Fatout, Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Lexicographer, 1951; P.  Fatout, Ambrose Bierce and the Black.  Hills, 1956; R.  0 'Conner, Ambrose Bierce: A Biography, 1967; M.  Grenander, Ambrose Bierce, 1971; S.  Woodruff, The Short

Stories of Ambrose Bierce, 1964; Critical Essays on Ambrose Bierce, ed.  C.  Davidson, 1982; L.  Berkove, Ambrose Bierce: A Braver Man than Anybody Knew, 1983; C.  Davidson, The Exper­imental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce, 1984; R.  Morris, Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company, 1995; L.  Berkove, The Moral Art of Ambrose Bierce, 2002; D.  Blume, Ambrose Bierce's Civil­ians and Soldiers in Context, 2004.

TEXT: Thies of Soldiers and Civilians, 1892.