Ambrose Bierce

• 1. Introduction

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  Ambrose Bierce closed his last known letter with a single sentence: "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination." He wrote those words in Chihuahua on the 26th of December, 1913, and then vanished. He was 71 years old and had survived the Battle of Shiloh, a traumatic brain injury at Kennesaw Mountain, a failed mining venture in the Dakota Territory, and decades of feuds with the most powerful men in American journalism. He had written what scholars called the greatest anti-war document in American literature. He had personally embarrassed a railroad magnate on the steps of the United States Capitol. And yet none of it was enough to keep him from walking into Mexico, and into silence. What made Bierce the most feared literary critic on the West Coast? How did a boy born in a log cabin in Ohio become ranked alongside Poe and Lovecraft as a master of horror? And what really happened to him when he crossed the border?

• 2. The Tenth of Thirteen

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  Horse Cave Creek, Meigs County, Ohio, is where Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born on the 24th of June, 1842. He was the tenth of thirteen children, every one of them given a name beginning with the letter A. His parents, Marcus Aurelius Bierce and Laura Sherwood Bierce, were poor but deeply literary, and they passed that love of books directly to their son. His mother was a descendant of William Bradford, and Bierce grew up keenly aware of his Puritan roots, even as he spent much of his adult life mocking the people who made a fuss about genealogy and the values that ancestry was supposed to represent. He left home at 15 to work as a printer's devil at a small abolitionist newspaper, the Northern Indianan. His uncle was Ohio politician and military officer Lucius V. Bierce, a connection that placed him near the machinery of public life even before the war arrived and changed everything.

• 3. Fire, Maps, and Battlefields

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  At the Kentucky Military Institute, Bierce's formal military education ended abruptly when the school closed after a fire in 1860. He enlisted in the Union Army's 9th Indiana Infantry as soon as the Civil War began. At the Battle of Philippi, the first organized land action of the war, he was present. At the Battle of Rich Mountain he drew newspaper attention for rescuing a gravely wounded comrade while under fire. Shiloh, in April 1862, was the experience that cut deepest; its horrors fed directly into several short stories and the memoir "What I Saw of Shiloh." By April 1863 he had been commissioned a first lieutenant and assigned to the staff of General William Babcock Hazen, drawing maps of likely battlefields as a topographical engineer. That position brought him into contact with generals George H. Thomas and Oliver O. Howard, both of whom backed his application to West Point in May 1864. General Hazen believed Bierce would graduate "with distinction." William T. Sherman also endorsed the application, though he noted he had no personal acquaintance with Bierce. The West Point path closed in June 1864 when Bierce took a traumatic brain injury at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. He spent the rest of that summer on furlough and returned to duty in September, fighting through the Franklin-Nashville campaign before resigning in January 1865 because his head wound kept its grip on him. Fits of fainting and irritability followed him for the rest of his life.

• 4. Printer to Power Broker

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  San Francisco in the 1870s and 1880s gave Bierce the platform his talent demanded. He became a familiar byline in The San Francisco News Letter, The Argonaut, the Overland Monthly, The Californian, and The Wasp. From the 1st of January, 1881, to the 11th of September, 1885, he edited The Wasp, where he launched a column called "Prattle." His years in London from 1872 to 1875, writing for Fun magazine, produced his first published book: The Fiend's Delight, released in 1873 by John Camden Hotten under the pseudonym "Dod Grile." Back in San Francisco, he joined William Randolph Hearst's newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, eventually rising to one of the most prominent editorial voices on the West Coast. His association with Hearst Newspapers stretched from those years until 1909. His writing made him influential and feared in equal measure; critic and novelist William Dean Howells called him one of America's three greatest writers, a compliment Bierce met with the reply, "I am sure Mr. Howells is the other two."

• 5. The Railroad and the Capitol Steps

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  In January 1896, Hearst sent Bierce to Washington, D.C., on a specific mission. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies, which had received large, low-interest federal loans to build the transcontinental railroad, were lobbying to have those loans, totaling $130 million, simply forgiven. Central Pacific executive Collis P. Huntington had arranged for a friendly congressman to introduce the bill quietly, counting on secrecy to keep it from generating any public opposition. Bierce arrived, began covering the story, and the strategy collapsed. Huntington confronted Bierce directly on the Capitol steps and told him to name his price. Bierce's answer reached newspapers across the country: "My price is one hundred thirty million dollars. If, when you are ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States." The public wrath Bierce stoked was enough to kill the bill. He returned to California in November. The episode showed what made Bierce so valuable and so dangerous: he understood that the right sentence, delivered publicly at the right moment, could move more than an army.

• 6. Writing Darkness

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  Between 1888 and 1891, in what was described as "a tremendous burst of consummate art," Bierce produced his most celebrated fiction. His war stories, a grimly realistic cycle of 25 pieces, drew on everything he had seen from Philippi to Kennesaw Mountain. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" became one of the most anthologized stories in American literature. "A Horseman in the Sky," "One of the Missing," and "Chickamauga" rounded out the war cycle. Milton Subotsky credited Bierce with helping pioneer the psychological horror story; H. P. Lovecraft, in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," called Bierce's fiction "grim and savage" and placed nearly all of it within the horror genre. Michael Dirda ranked Bierce alongside Poe and Lovecraft for his horror writing, while S. T. Joshi speculated he may be the greatest satirist America has produced, comparable to Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire. Bierce's short stories "Haita the Shepherd" and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" seeded names and locations, including Hastur and Carcosa and Lake Hali, that Robert W. Chambers used in The King in Yellow in 1895. Chambers then influenced Lovecraft, and through Lovecraft, much of modern horror fiction. Stephen Crane was among the minority of Bierce's contemporaries who openly valued his experimental short stories; their influence extended to Ernest Hemingway as well. The Devil's Dictionary, first published in book form in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book, collected his satirical definitions of English words and was described as "howlingly funny." Its seventh volume in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, published from 1909 to 1912, stands alone as a literary monument to sustained misanthropy. Bierce himself oversaw all twelve volumes of that collected edition.

• 7. The Last Letter

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  In October 1913, Bierce left Washington, D.C., to tour the Civil War battlefields where he had fought half a century before. He was 71. Reports placed him moving through Louisiana and Texas, crossing into Mexico at El Paso as the country churned through revolution. In Ciudad Juárez he joined Pancho Villa's army as an observer, and in that role he witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca. He reportedly accompanied Villa's army as far as the city of Chihuahua. There he wrote his final letter to Blanche Partington, dated the 26th of December, 1913. He closed it by saying he was leaving the next day for an unknown destination. What followed was silence. Investigators questioned some of Villa's men; their accounts conflicted. U.S. Army chief of staff Hugh L. Scott contacted Villa's U.S. representative Felix A. Sommerfeld, who investigated and found nothing conclusive. Oral tradition in Sierra Mojada, Coahuila, preserved by priest James Lienert, holds that Bierce was executed by a Huertista firing squad in the town's cemetery. Bierce had written in an earlier letter, "Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico, ah, that is euthanasia!" Carlos Fuentes turned the mystery into his 1985 novel The Old Gringo, which became a film four years later with Gregory Peck in the title role. Fuentes said it was his admiration for Tales of Soldiers and Civilians that started the whole project. In 2005, Kurt Vonnegut called "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" the greatest American short story, a work of "flawless American genius" -- written by a man no one could account for, last seen heading somewhere unknown.