Ambrose Bierce was born in Miegs County, Ohio, in 1842, but he grew up in northern Indiana. Bierce briefly attended the Kentucky Military Institute, where he apparently studied surveying and mapmaking. When the Civil War broke out, he enlisted as a private in the Indiana Ninth Brigade and eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant and served as regimental cartographer. He was present at some of the fiercest battles in the war—Shiloh, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Pickett’s Mill, and others—and his war experience later provided the background for his most important war stories and for several autobiographical essays and sketches. After the war, he served as an aide for the Treasury Department in Alabama and later joined a fact finding expedition to the west. Eventually, he settled in San Francisco, and it was there he committed himself to the literary profession. He was a columnist and editor for various newspapers, including William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. In 1871 he traveled with his wife to England and remained there for three years, writing for the British periodicals Figaro and Fun; his first three books were published in England. After he returned to California, Bierce continued to work as a journalist, but, particularly in the 1880s, he also devoted much of creative energy to writing short fiction. He published his collection of war fiction, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, in 1892, and a volume of tales of the supernatural, Can Such Things Be?, in 1893. He also continued to work on his wry and sardonic definitions and collected them in his notorious The Devil’s Dictionary (1911). Bierce’s lacerating wit and devilish satire earned him the epithet “Bitter Bierce.” After 1899, Bierce lived in the East, and the last years of his life were largely devoted to preparing a handsome twelve volume set of his Collected Works (1902-12). That work complete, he revisited the battle sites of his youth and then traveled westward to El Paso. In December, 1913, he entered Mexico, presumably to accompany Pancho Villa’s army. He was never heard from again.

Tom Quirk is Professor of English at the University of Missouri- Columbia. He has written on several American authors, including Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Twain, Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, Willa Cather, Joyce Carol Oates, Langston Hughes, and others. He is the author of Melville’s Confidence Man, Bergson and American Culture, Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn, and Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction. He is the editor or co-editor of several books, including Writing the American Classics, American Realism and the Canon, Mark Twain: Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches, Biographies of Books, and The Viking Portable American Realism Reader.