Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce (Meigs, Ohio, 1842 – Mexico, January 1914) was an American journalist, editor and writer, best remembered for his horror and war stories and for his biting satire. He lived between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and wrote in English. His work still engages readers because it blends dark humour with a disillusioned view of war and of human nature.

He was born in a log cabin in Ohio, the tenth of twelve children, into a family of farmers with a strict Calvinist upbringing. He grew up in Indiana and at fifteen left home to work as an apprentice at a small abolitionist newspaper. In 1859 he entered the Kentucky Military Institute, which closed the following year after a fire.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he enlisted in an Indiana infantry regiment. He served as a topographical officer on a general's staff and fought at Shiloh, Chickamauga and Chattanooga, and during the Atlanta campaign he was seriously wounded at Kennesaw Mountain. Those experiences shaped much of his fiction. After the war he held a brief post in the regular army and in 1866 gave up military life for good.

In San Francisco he built a reputation as a journalist and became friends with Mark Twain. Between 1872 and 1875 he lived in London, where he wrote his first satirical pieces and saw a collection of his articles published under a pseudonym. Back in California he edited magazines and joined William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner. In 1889 he moved to Washington, though his ties to Hearst's papers lasted for years.

His style relies on irony, abrupt openings, dark imagery and a bleak view of human nature. His fables and his satirical glossary, The Devil's Dictionary, attack political corruption and the social clichés of his day. Several of his stories, among them An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, have become classics of horror and war writing. H. P. Lovecraft admired him, though he also faulted the uneven, journalistic quality of his prose.

His personal life was hard. He separated from his wife in 1888 and divorced in 1904, and two of his sons met tragic ends. He suffered from ill health for much of his life. In 1913 he announced that he was travelling to Mexico to see the Revolution at first hand, and then he vanished. He is believed to have died in Ojinaga in January 1914, although no definitive evidence was ever found.

His legacy lies in psychological horror, where he is regarded as an early pioneer, and in anti-war military fiction that influenced later writers. As a satirist he is placed alongside figures such as Swift, and his name still carries the nickname "Bitter Bierce" that his contemporaries gave him.