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Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs

In the Midst of Life (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians) | Can Such Things Be? | The Devil’s Dictionary | Bits of Autobiography | selected stories More

Edited by S. T. Joshi

“Carey McWilliams, that muckraking California journalist whose 1929 biography of Bierce remains the most astute assessment of the man and the writer, wrote hopefully, ‘Only one thing . . . is needed to insure Bierce’s place in American and world literature: a one- or two-volume edition of the best of his writing.’ We now have that volume.”—Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week “Soldiers and Ghosts,” Ambrose Bierce
June 24, 2024

Story of the Week “A Lady from Redhorse,” Ambrose Bierce
June 25, 2023

Story of the Week Ambrose Bierce, “An Affair of Outposts”
October 14, 2022

A veteran of some of the bloodiest battles of the civil War—among them Shiloh, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Kennesaw Mountain—Ambrose Bierce went on to become one of the darkest and most death-haunted of American writers, the blackest of black humorists. A prolific journalist who made himself a dominant figure in the emerging literary culture of postwar san Francisco, Bierce developed a style of slashing sarcasm that made him a feared antagonist. As a short story writer—whether drawing on wartime experiences or exploring realms of supernatural and psychological horror—he used extreme situations to give voice to his uniquely engrossing brand of pessimism.

This volume gathers the most celebrated and significant of Bierce’s writings. In the Midst of Life (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians), his collection of short fiction about the Civil War, which includes the masterpieces “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “Chickamauga,” is suffused with a fiercely ironic sense of the horror and randomness of war. Close-up portraits of life in camp and on the battlefield offer unique, often startling, perspectives on the war whose after-echoes pervade Bierce’s writing.

Can Such Things Be? brings together “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” “The Damned Thing,” “The Moonlit Road,” and other tales of terror that make Bierce the genre’s most significant American practitioner between Poe and Lovecraft. These tales are notable, in editor S. T. Joshi’s words, for “the meticulous etching of the precise effects of the supernatural upon the sensitive consciousness of his fear-raddled protagonists.”

The Devil’s Dictionary, the brilliant lexicon of subversively cynical definitions on which Bierce worked for decades, displays to the full his corrosive wit.

In Bits of Autobiography, the series of memoirs that includes the memorable “What I Saw of Shiloh,” he recreates his experiences in the war and its aftermath. The volume is rounded out with a selection of the best stories not gathered in the two major collections. Acclaimed Bierce scholar Joshi provides detailed notes and a newly researched chronology of Bierce’s life and mysterious disappearance.

S. T. Joshi, editor, is the author of H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1997) and many other books. He is also the editor of The Collected Fables of Ambrose Bierce (2000) and co-editor with David E. Schultz of Ambrose Bierce: A Sole Survivor—Bits of Autobiography (1998), Ambrose Bierce: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources (1999), and The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary (2002).

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs is kept in print with a gift from Benito Cachinero-Sánchez and Deborah G. Gorman to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Story of the Week “Soldiers and Ghosts,” Ambrose Bierce
June 24, 2024

Story of the Week “A Lady from Redhorse,” Ambrose Bierce
June 25, 2023

Story of the Week Ambrose Bierce, “An Affair of Outposts”
October 14, 2022

Story of the Week Ambrose Bierce, “Moxon’s Master”
October 23, 2018

Story of the Week Ambrose Bierce, “Chickamauga”
June 27, 2017
Table of Contents

In the Midst of Life (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians)

Soldiers
A Horseman in the Sky
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Chickamauga
A Son of the Gods
One of the Missing
Killed at Resaca
The Affair at Coulter’s Notch
The Coup de Grâce
Parker Adderson, Philosopher
An Affair of Outposts
The Story of a Conscience
One Kind of Officer
One Officer, One Man
George Thurston
The Mocking-Bird

Civilians
The Man Out of the Nose
An Adventure at Brownville
The Famous Gilson Bequest
The Applicant
A Watcher by the Dead
The Man and the Snake
A Holy Terror
The Suitable Surroundings
The Boarded Window
A Lady from Red Horse
The Eyes of the Panther

Can Such Things Be?

Can Such Things Be?
The Death of Halpin Frayser
The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch
One Summer Night
The Moonlit Road
A Diagnosis of Death
Moxon’s Master
A Tough Tussle
One of Twins
The Haunted Valley
A Jug of Sirup
Staley Fleming’s Hallucination
A Resumed Identity
A Baby Tramp
The Night-Doings at “Deadman’s”
Beyond the Wall
A Psychological Shipwreck
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot
John Mortonson’s Funeral
The Realm of the Unreal
John Bartine’s Watc
The Damned Thing
Haýýti the Shepherd
An Inhabitant of Carcosa
The Stranger

The Ways of Ghosts
Present at a Hanging
A Cold Greeting
A Wireless Message
An Arrest

Soldier-Folk
A Man with Two Lives
Three and One Are One
A Baffled Ambuscade
Two Military Executions

Some Haunted Houses
The Isle of Pines
A Fruitless Assignment
A Vine on a House
At Old Man Eckert’s
The Spook House
The Other Lodgers
The Thing at Nolan

“Mysterious Disappearances”
The Difficulty of Crossing a Field
An Unfinished Race
Charles Ashmore’s Trail

The Devil’s Dictionary

Bits of Autobiography
On a Mountain
What I Saw of Shiloh
A Little of Chickamauga
The Crime at Pickett’s Mill
Four Days in Dixie
What Occurred at Franklin
’Way Down in Alabam’
Working for an Empress
Across the Plains
The Mirage
A Sole Survivor

Selected Stories
Mrs. Dennison’s Head
The Man Overboard
Jupiter Doke, Brigadier-General
A Bottomless Grave
For the Ahkoond
My Favorite Murder
Oil of Dog
Ashes of the Beacon

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-102-2 891 pages

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N° 219 Library of America Series

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