Ambrose Bierce
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a distinctive strand of American letters marked by satirical edge and a willingness to interrogate the conventions of both literature and public life. Ambrose Bierce, born on June 24, 1842, in Meigs County, was among the writers who worked within and against that culture, producing journalism, poetry, short fiction, fables, and aphorisms in the English language across a career that drew on the full range of those forms.
Bierce worked simultaneously as a journalist, a satirist, a poet, and a short story writer, a combination that gave his output an unusual breadth. His fiction extended into science fiction as well as the fable, allowing him to move across registers while maintaining the acerbic perspective that characterized his writing in other forms. Among his notable works, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians gathered short fiction under a single volume, while An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and The Damned Thing stand as individual stories that readers and critics have returned to as representative examples of his work in the form.
Outside those works, Bierce produced The Devil's Dictionary, which applied his aphorist's sensibility to the vocabulary of everyday life. The book demonstrated how the techniques of journalism and satire could be concentrated into a single sustained project, and it placed his output within a tradition of pointed social commentary. Taken together, his prose and verse work positioned him as a writer who moved across genres without abandoning the satirical orientation that runs through his career as a whole.
Bierce died in 1914, with Chihuahua City recorded as his place of death. The circumstances surrounding his final months remained a subject of documented uncertainty. His works, including The Devil's Dictionary and the stories associated with his name, continued to attract critical attention as examples of American satirical and short fiction writing from the period in which he worked.
Quotes by Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Bierce's insights on:
The fallen soldier (the word “hero” appears to be a later invention) has such humble honors as it is possible to give. His part in all the pomp that fills The circuit of the Summer hills Is that his grave is green. True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are marked unknown, and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the contradiction involved in honoring the memory of whom no memory remains to honor, but the attempt seems to do no great harm to the living, even to the logical.
If life were not worth having,' said the preacher, / 'T would have in suicide one pleasant feature.' / 'An error,' said the pessimist, 'you're making: / What's not worth having cannot be worth taking.
Still must our ears without redress submit / To hear you play the solemn hypocrite / Walking in spirit some high moral level, / Raising at once his eye-balls and the devil?
Love is a temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.
ORPHAN, n. A living person whom death has deprived of the power of filial ingratitude --a privation appealing with a particular eloquence to all that is sympathetic in human nature. When young the orphan is commonly sent to an asylum, where by careful cultivation of its rudimentary sense of locality it is taught to know its place. It is then instructed in the arts of dependence and servitude and eventually turned loose to prey upon the world as a bootblack or scullery maid.
Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising for contemplating the misery of another.