AMBROSE BIERCE

(1842-1914?)

BACKGROUND

  • parents = ultra-religious
    • Horse Cave creek, Ohio = religious community
    • First Congregational Church of Christ = “fire & brimstone” religion
  • 9th of 9 children
    • all start w/the letter “A”
  • older - cut himself off from parents, siblings
  • “Bitter Bierce”
    • disappointed
    • pessimistic
    • cynical
    • misanthropic
  • Kentucky Military Institute (only formal schooling)
  • 1861:
    • start of Civil War
    • AB enlisted for the North/Union Army
      • (9th Indiana Infantry & Buell’s Army of Ohio)
    • witnessed some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War
    • Shiloh, Pickett’s Mill, and Chickamauga, Sherman’s march to sea
    • wounded 2x
    • rose to lieutenant
    • * experiences = short stories
      • “The Crime at Pickett’s Mill” (1888)
      • “A Son of the Gods” (1888)
      • “The Coup de Grâce” (1889)
      • “Chickamauga” (1889)
      • “The Affair at Coulter’s Notch” (1889)
      • “Parker Adderson, Philosopher and Wit” (1891)
      • “A Horseman in the Sky” (1891)
      • “Two Military Executions” (1906)
      • and, some say his most popular short story
      • “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890)
      • Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891, collection)

BACKGROUND

  • 1865:
    • resigned
    • “a bullet wound to the head continued to plague him with dizziness and black outs” (OLO)
  • 1866: moved to San Francisco - JOURNALIST
    • career for the rest of his life
    • columnist & later, editor, of News Letter
    • friends w/Mark Twain, Bret Harte, George Sterling (this group established SF = literary center)
  • 1872: married & moved to England (1872-76)
    • sharpened his writing skills
    • honed his satire
  • returned to SF; popular column the “Prattler”
    • reviews, gossip, social commentary, political remarks
    • some stories
  • 1891:
    • Tales of Soldiers & Civilians (later, In the Midst of Life)
  • 1906:
    • The Devil’s Dictionary
    • (1st published as The Cynic’s World Book)
  • personal disasters:
    • 1891= divorced
    • 1889 – elder son = shot to death (over a girl)
    • 1901 = younger son dead from alcoholism
    • 1913 = AB disappeared without a trace
    • went to Mexico
    • in the Mexican revolution (Pancho Villa vs. Gen. Huerta)
    • died somehow (??)

 

THEMES

  • Civil War
  • anti-war
  • anti-humanity (misanthropy)
  • supernatural

Excerpts from The Devil's Dictionary

  • (1906)
  • (aka, The Cynic’s World Book)
  • PAST, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one--the knowledge and the dream.
     

EXCERPT

  • MARRIAGE, n.
    • The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
  • WAR, n.
    • A by-product of the arts of peace.
  • PEACE, n.
    • In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
  • BIRTH, n.
    • The first and direst of all disasters.
  • CYNIC, n.
    • A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
  • DICTIONARY, n.
    • A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.
  • < http://www.thedevilsdictionary.com/ >
     

STYLE

  • “Bitter Bierce”
    • disappointed
    • pessimistic
    • cynical
    • misanthropic
    • nihilism
    • gallows humor
    • ironic or black humor
      • (deaths of protagonists)
    • mordant/sardonic/acerbic wit
      • (1906’s The Cynic’s World Book [DD])
      • observations of personalities in SF in “Prattler”
    • the grotesque
      • “Bitter Bierce”
      • “the wickedest man in San Francisco”
  • contempt for society, psychology, politics, religion, conventional human values
  • dislike for hypocrisy, prejudice, corruption
  • “[…] Bierce, like Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer after him, converted the disordered experience of man at war into resonant and dramatic fictional moments.” (Norton)

 STYLE

  • Journalistic:
    • objective
    • reporting
    • descriptive
    • realism
      • (Hemingway, Updike)
  • realistic portrayals of Civil War
  • bare, economic style
  • like EA POE:
    • Gothic
    • supernatural
    • death
    • mental deterioration
    • the uncanny
    • horror of existence in meaningless universe

LINKS LINKS