Ambrose Bierce
(1842–c. 1914)

Both Ambrose Bierce's literary career and his philosophy of life were shaped by his career as a Union officer in the Civil War. His experiences provided the material for his best short stories and helped determine the unsentimental, cynical, pessimistic view of the world he expressed in his writing.

Bierce was born in Ohio and raised on a farm in Indiana. Having educated himself by reading his father's books, Bierce left the farm during his late teens to attend a military academy in Kentucky. A year later the Civil War broke out, and he enlisted in the Union army. He fought in several important battles and rose from private to major. Toward the end of the conflict, he was seriously wounded, but he returned to battle a few months later.

When the war ended, Bierce settled in San Francisco and began a career in journalism. His column, the "prattler," which appeared in The Argonaut (1877–1879), the Wasp (1880–1886), and the San Francisco Sunday Examiner (1887–1896), was a mixture of biting political and social satire, literary reviews, and gossip. Bierce also published many of his finest short stories in his column.

In the early 1890s, Bierce published two collections of his stories: Tales of soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can Such Things Be? (1893). The concise, carefully plotted stories in these collections, set for the most part during the Civil War, capture the cruelty and futility of war and the indifference of death and reflect Bierce's cynical view of human existence. Bierce's pessimistic outlook is also reflected in The Devil's Dictionary (1906), a book of humorous and cynical definitions.

Although Bierce enjoyed a successful career as a writer, his personal life was filled with tragedy and despair. His marriage ended in divorce and his two sons both died at an early age. In 1913, the lonely and disillusioned writer traveled into Mexico, a country in the midst of a bloody civil war, and never returned. The circumstances of his death are still unknown.

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