Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born on June 24, 1842 in the settlement of Horse Cave, Ohio. He was the tenth of thirteen children born to Marcus Aurelius and Laura Sherwood Bierce.
The Bierces moved to Indiana during Ambrose's childhood, settling in Warsaw and then Elkhart.
Bierce benefited a great deal from his father's farmhouse library, and late in life declared it to be his most important early educational influence.
Another early influence on Bierce was his uncle, General Lucius Verus Bierce of Akron, Ohio. Ambrose observed carefully the man's idealism, oratorical skills, public service, and social activism. All his life, Bierce held up the career of his uncle as a model for his own.
When about seventeen, Bierce enrolled at the Kentucky Military Institute. There he learned about military subjects and appears to have studied topographical engineering. He adapted well to military life and discipline.
He left the Institute on the eve of the Civil War, returning to Indiana in 1860.
Following the secession of seven southern states, on April 15, 1861 President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to help preserve the Union. Four days later, Bierce enlisted as a private in the Ninth Indiana Infantry, Company C. After three months’ service, and his first battle at Philippi, he re-enlisted as a sergeant and served with his unit in West Virginia.
Bierce fought in some of the most famous and horrific battles of the Civil War, including Shiloh, Corinth, Stones River, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Franklin. He was commissioned second lieutenant in 1862, and first lieutenant after Stones River in 1863.
Bierce was in time assigned to the staff of General W. B. Hazen, on which he served as a topographical engineer. In this capacity, he surveyed the landscape and prepared detailed maps of the regions over which the Union army maneuvered and fought.
During the fighting at Kennesaw Mountain on June 23, 1864, Bierce suffered a grievous head wound from a Confederate bullet. Hospitalized for months, he was back in action in September during the Franklin-Nashville campaign. Bouts of dizziness and frequent blackouts -- the aftershocks of his wound -- forced him to resign from the army on January 25, 1865.
Following his departure from the military, Bierce became a Treasury agent in Alabama. In 1866, he joined Hazen on an expedition into Indian Territory, making maps of the regions through which they passed. The party reached San Francisco in 1867, and Bierce remained there as an employee of the U.S. Mint.
In San Francisco, Bierce read deeply and sought to develop his emerging talents as a wordsmith and grammarian. City newspapers began to receive literary submissions from Bierce, mostly essays and comic sketches, and the San Francisco News-Letter and California Advertiser was the first to publish his work.
When James Watkins resigned from the News-Letter in 1868, Bierce replaced him as managing editor. Increasingly confident of his mastery of language and literary style, the new editor gladly took over the paper’s existing column, "The Town Crier." From this literary pulpit, Bierce savaged the city's hypocrites and political scoundrels. His writing was characterized by sharp wit, precise language, and moral certitude. These entertaining columns attracted the attention of readers beyond San Francisco, and were at times quoted in the newspapers of New York and even London.
During his time at the News-Letter, Bierce met and became familiar with a wide number of Western journalists and writers, among them Mark Twain.
In the late 1860s, Bierce began to experiment with short fiction. He submitted his earliest work to Western journals such as the Overland Monthly, edited by the famed Bret Harte. It was there that Bierce placed "The Haunted Valley," his first short story.
Bierce married Mary Ellen Day on December 25, 1871.
In March 1872, Bierce resigned his position at the News-Letter in order that he and Mary might enjoy an extended honeymoon in England. Once in London, Bierce began to submit his writing to a number of English journals. He placed pieces with Fun, Figaro, and the London Sketch-Book. For Figaro, he authored a regular column entitled "The Passing Showman."
The first child of Ambrose and Mary, a boy named Day, was born in 1872. Not long into their stay in England, the Bierces moved to Bristol -- in part because the damp and fog of London had exacerbated Bierce's asthma, a health condition that plagued him his entire life.
While in England, Bierce published his first books: The Fiend's Delight and Nuggets and Dust in 1873, and Cobwebs From an Empty Skull in 1874. These works contain various short pieces, sketches, and anecdotes culled from Bierce's publications in both California and England.
During his time in England, Bierce continued to develop his powers as a satirist. The new environment helped to broaden his understanding of human society, and he became even more critical of mankind's pretenses, hypocrisies, and immoral legal and political institutions.
A second son, Leigh, arrived in 1874. The Bierces ended the tour abroad in the fall of 1875, returning to San Francisco.
Having returned to San Francisco, Bierce was soon the father of a third child, Helen. He resumed work as a writer, and in 1877 accepted a position as the editor of Argonaut.
At Argonaut, Bierce began his famous column "Prattle." Like his older "Town Crier" column, "Prattle" provided him with a forum for publishing his own poetry, quips, anecdotes, stories, and essays. He also used the space to identify and excoriate those men and women whose words, actions, and writing he objected to on moral or aesthetic grounds.
Bierce ended his stint at Argonaut in 1880, when in June he began an ill-fated job at Rockerville, South Dakota as the general manager of a Black Hills gold mining company. The hard-working and honest Bierce was disgusted by the corrupt legal system that oversaw the industry, and demoralized by the frequent deceptions and betrayals of others. The experience seems to have further soured him on the courts, the business world, and human nature at large.
Returning to San Francisco by the end of 1880, Bierce found a new position at the Wasp, where he continued his column "Prattle." Here he published or reprinted some of his Civil War writings and began publication of what would become The Devil's Dictionary.
During these years, continued asthma attacks at times forced Bierce to leave San Francisco and take up residence in hill resorts. His lengthy stay at one resort, Auburn, coincided with the growing emotional distance between Bierce and Mary.
For numerous reasons, Bierce left the Wasp in 1886. During his time at the journal, his talents as a serious writer had very nearly reached maturity. For about a year Bierce had no position to speak of, and found it difficult to place his work because of the enemies he had made as an outspoken and unforgiving social critic.
In 1887, William Randolph Hearst sought out and hired Bierce to write for the San Francisco Examiner, the first periodical in what would become the Hearst media goliath. “Prattle” was given new life, and Bierce demanded and won the right to express himself as he wished, without fear of editorial intrusion.
In addition to columns in which he speared the usual assortment of politicians, charlatans, and literary figures, Bierce began to publish serious short fiction and nonfiction. During this period, he published many of his famous pieces about the Civil War. These include: “The Crime at Pickett’s Mill” (1888), “A Son of the Gods” (1888), “Chickamauga” (1889), “A Horseman in the Sky” (1889), “The Affair at Coulter’s Notch” (1889), and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890).
In 1888, Bierce and his wife formally separated. Beyond the long-held differences between them, Bierce believed that Mary had willingly received love letters from another man. It may be that Bierce had jumped to conclusions about her impropriety, but his pride required him to seek the separation. Thereafter, he apparently spoke to her in person on only two occasions.
An even greater personal misfortune occurred in 1889, with the tragic death of Bierce’s son Day. Not yet eighteen-years-old, the youth was involved in a gunfight with a friend who had run off with and married Day’s own fiancée. Both combatants were mortally wounded.
Despite these blows, Bierce in this period achieved the height of his creative powers, and was never a more potent satirist. A body of young writers sought his advice, championed his work, and spread his already considerable fame throughout the United States.
In 1892, Bierce published his masterpiece Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (publication date 1891), a carefully-arranged collection of his Civil War stories. The book was widely-reviewed to great acclaim in America, as was the English version, re-titled In the Midst of Life (1892).
Other publications followed in short order, including The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter (1892), a translation of a German novel by Richard Voss. More notably, in 1893 Bierce published Can Such Things Be?, a collection of supernatural stories he had written for the Examiner.
After 1893, Bierce produced fewer short stories and seems to have focused on "Prattle" rather than on other literary endeavors.
At Hearst’s request, he left San Francisco for Washington, D.C. in 1896. Hearst aimed to upset the railroad funding bill sponsored by Collis P. Huntington, and wanted his best and most lacerating columnist on location in the capital. Bierce agreed that the corrupt Southern Pacific Railroad should not win further support from Congress, and his famous literary campaign against Huntington helped to defeat the bill. He returned to San Francisco feeling re-energized, but in time seemed to lose his zeal for the usual satirical assaults on his enemies.
In February 1898, Bierce reversed his pacifist position regarding war with Spain. The destruction of the Maine persuaded him that war was necessary in Cuba, and he changed the name of "Prattle" to "War Topics." But during the ensuing Spanish-American War, Bierce reported on events with waning enthusiasm and solemnity. He believed the military incompetent, and again questioned the wisdom of U.S. involvement in Cuba.
In these years, Bierce continued to counsel young writers such as George Sterling and Herman Scheffauer. He at times became estranged from his pupils, particularly those whose work he believed lacked originality and truth.
Bierce applied for permanent transfer to Washington in 1899, and Hearst approved. In Washington, Bierce wrote pieces for the Examiner as well as Cosmopolitan and other magazines. He was entertained by President Roosevelt and other Washingtonians eager to meet the notorious journalist and writer.
Another personal tragedy occurred in late March 1901, when Bierce’s son Leigh died of pneumonia in New York. Bierce was shocked and sickened to have outlived two of his three children.
Bierce spent the autumn of 1903 in West Virginia, surveying the ground he had known as a young soldier. In a life that felt increasingly empty, the old sites filled him with welcome emotion.
On April 27, 1905, his wife Mary died of heart failure in Los Angeles. Just a few months earlier she had sued for divorce, perhaps believing that Bierce wanted to remarry in Washington. He never did.
He ceased to write for Hearst entirely in 1909, when he began to arrange his Collected Works, an uneven, twelve-volume collection published between 1909 and 1912 by the Neale Publishing Company.
Having reached the end of his literary career, and feeling the need for change and adventure, Bierce made plans to leave Washington for good. His letters to family and associates suggest that he was seeking an end in revolutionary Mexico. Famously, he wrote to his niece that it would be "a pretty good way to depart this life" to be "stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags."
In the fall of 1913, while en route to El Paso, Bierce paid final respects to a number of his old Civil War battlefields. He passed over the Mexican border in late autumn, and wrote one last letter from Chihuahua on December 26. He ended by remarking, "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination." Thereafter, Bierce disappeared. Despite the many rumors and hypotheses concerning his death, nothing substantial is known of his final days.