Ambrose Bierce

Titles in Short Stories category:

• Affair At Coulter's, The

  "Do you think, colonel, that your brave Coulter would like to put one of his guns in here!" the general asked.

• Affair Of Outposts, An

  Two men sat in conversation. One was the Governor of the State. The year was 1861; the war was on and the Governor already famous for the intelligence and zeal with which he directed all the powers and resources of his State to the service of the Union.

• Arrest, An

  Having murdered his brother-in-law, Orrin Brower of Kentucky was a fugitive from justice. From the county jail where he had been confined to await his trial he had escaped by knocking down his jailer with an iron bar, robbing him of his keys and, opening the outer door, walking out into ...

• Baby Tramp, A    

  If you had seen little Jo standing at the street corner in the rain, you would hardly have admired him. It was apparently an ordinary autumn rainstorm, but the water which fell upon Jo (who was hardly old enough to be either just or unjust, and so perhaps did not come under the law of imp ...

• Baffled Ambuscade, A

  Connecting Readyville and Woodbury was a good, hard turnpike nine or ten miles long. Readyville was an outpost of the Federal army at Murfreesboro; Woodbury had the same relation to the Confederate army at Tullahoma. For months after the big battle at Stone River these outposts were in constant ...

• Beyond The Wall

  Many years ago, on my way from Hong Kong to New York, I passed a week in San Francisco. A long time had gone by since I had been in that city, during which my ventures in the Orient had prospered beyond my hope; I was rich and could afford to revisit my own country to renew my friendship ...

• Bivouac of the Dead, A    

  Away up in the heart of the Allegheny mountains, in Pocahontas county, West Virginia, is a beautiful little valley through which flows the east fork of the Greenbrier river. At a point where the valley road intersects the old Staunton and Parkersburg turnpike, a famous thoroughfare in its day, ...

• Boarded Window, The

  In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier - restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to tha ...

• Charles Ashmore's Trail

  The family of Christian Ashmore consisted of his wife, his mother, two grown daughters, and a son of sixteen years. They lived in Troy, New York, were well-to-do, respectable persons, and had many friends, some of whom, reading these lines, will doubtless learn for the first time the ext ...

• Chickamauga    

  One sunny autumn afternoon a child strayed away from its rude home in a small field and entered a forest unobserved. It was happy in a new sense of freedom from control, happy in the opportunity of exploration and adventure; for this child's spirit, in bodies of its ancestors, had for thousands ...

• Cold Greeting, A

  This is a story told by the late Benson Foley of San Francisco:

• Coup De Grace, The    

  The fighting had been hard and continuous; that was atested by all the senses. The very taste of battle was in the air. All was now over; it remained only to succor the wounded and bury the dead--to "tidy up a bit," as the humorist of a burial squad put it. A good deal of "tidying up" was requi ...

• Crime at Pickett's Mill, The    

  There is a class of events which by their very nature, and despite any intrinsic interest that they may possess, are foredoomed to oblivion. They are merged in the general story of those greater events of which they were a part, as the thunder of a billow breaking on a distant beach is unnoted ...

• Damned Thing, The

  By the light of a tallow candle, which had been placed on one end of a rough table, a man was reading something written in a book. It was an old account book, greatly worn; and the writing was not, apparently, very legible, for the man sometimes held the page close to the flame of the candle to ...

• Death Of Halpin Frayser, The

  For by death is wrought greater change than hath been shown. Whereas in general the spirit that removed cometh back upon occasion, and is sometimes seen of those in flesh (appearing in the form of the body it bore) yet it hath happened that the veritable body without the spirit hath walke ...

• Diagnosis of Death, A

  'I am not so superstitious as some of your physicians - men of science, as you are pleased to be called,' said Hawver, replying to an accusation that had not been made. 'Some of you - only a few, I confess - believe in the immortality of the soul, and in apparitions which you have not the ...

• Difficulty of Crossing a Field, The

  One morning in July, 1854, a planter named Williamson, living six miles from Selma, Alabama, was sitting with his wife and a child on the veranda of his dwelling. Immediately in front of the house was a lawn, perhaps fifty yards in extent between the house and public road, or, as it was ...

• Four Days in Dixie    

  During a part of the month of October, 1864, the Federal and Confederate armies of Sherman and Hood respectively, having performed a surprising and resultless series of marches and countermarches since the fall of Atlanta, confronted each other along the separating line of the Coosa River in th ...

• Fruitless Assignment, A

  Henry Saylor, who was killed in Covington, in a quarrel with Antonio Finch, was a reporter on the Cincinnati Commercial. In the year 1859 a vacant dwelling in Vine street, in Cincinnati, became the center of a local excitement because of the strange sights and sounds said to be observed ...

• George Thurston

  George Thurston was a first lieutenant and aide-de-camp on the staff of Colonel Brough, commanding a Federal brigade. Colonel Brough was only temporarily in command, as senior colonel, the brigadier-general having been severely wounded and granted a leave of absence to recover. Lieutenant Thurst ...

• Haita The Shepherd

  In the heart of Haita the illusions of youth had not been supplanted by those of age and experience. His thoughts were pure and pleasant, for his life was simple and his soul devoid of ambition. He rose with the sun and went forth to pray at the shrine of Hastur, the god of shepherds, who ...

• Haunted Valley, The

  I. How Trees Are Felled in China

• Heiress from Redhorse, An

  CORONADO, June 20th.

• Horseman in the Sky, A    

  One sunny afternoon in the autumn of the year 1861, a soldier lay in a clump of laurel by the side of a road in Western Virginia. He lay at full length, upon his stomach, his feet resting upon the toes, his head upon the left forearm. His extended right hand loosely grasped his rifle. But for t ...

• Hypnotist, The

  By those of my friends who happen to know that I sometimes amuse myself with hypnotism, mind reading and kindred phenomena, I am frequently asked if I have a clear conception of the nature of whatever principle underlies them. To this question I always reply that I neither have nor desir ...

• Imperfect Conflagration, An

  Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father--an act which made a deep impression on me at the time. This was before my marriage, while I was living with my parents in Wisconsin. My father and I were in the library of our home, dividing the proceeds of a burglary which we had com ...

• Inhabitant Of Carcosa, An

  For there be divers sorts of death -- some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit. This commonly occurreth only in solitude (such is God's will) and, none seeing the end, we say the man is lost, or gone on a long journey -- which indeed he hath; bu ...

• Isle of Pines, The

  For many years there lived near the town of Gallipolis, Ohio, an old man named Herman Deluse. Very little was known of his history, for he would neither speak of it himself nor suffer others. It was a common belief among his neighbors that he had been a pirate--if upon any better eviden ...

• John Bartine's Watch

  A Story by a Physician

• John Mortonson's Funeral    

  John Mortonson was dead: his lines in 'the tragedy "Man"' had all been spoken and he had left the stage.

• Jug Of Syrup, A

  This narrative begins with the death of its hero. Silas Deemer died on the I6th day of July, 1863; and two days later his remains were buried. As he had been personally known to every man, woman and well-grown child in the village, the funeral, as the local newspaper phrased it, 'was larg ...

• Jupiter Doke, Brigadier-General    

  Having faith in your patriotism and ability, the President has been pleased to appoint you a brigadier-general of volunteers. Do you accept?

• Killed at Resaca

  The best soldier of our staff was Lieutenant Herman Brayle, one of the two aides-de-camp. I don't remember where the general picked him up; from some Ohio regiment, I think; none of us had previously known him, and it would have been strange if we had, for no two of us came from the same State, ...

• Little of Chickamauga, A    

  The history of that awful struggle is well known--I have not the intention to record it here, but only to relate some part of what I saw of it; my purpose not instruction, but entertainment.

• Man and the Snake, The

  I

• Man with Two Lives, A

  Here is the queer story of David William Duck, related by himself. Duck is an old man living in Aurora, Illinois, where he is universally respected. He is commonly known, however, as "Dead Duck."

• Middle Toe of the Right Foot, The    

  It is well known that the old Manton house is haunted. In all the rural district near about, and even in the town of Marshall, a mile away, not one person of unbiased mind entertains a doubt of it; incredulity is confined to those opinionated persons who will be called 'cranks' as soon as ...

• Mocking-Bird, The

  The time, a pleasant Sunday afternoon in the early autumn of 1861. The place, a forest's heart in the mountain region of southwestern Virginia. Private Grayrock of the Federal Army is discovered seated comfortably at the root of a great pine tree, against which he leans, his legs extended strai ...

• Moonlit Road, The    

  1. Statement of Joel Hetman, Jr.

• Moxon's Master

  'Are you serious? -- do you really believe that a machine thinks?'

• My Favorite Murder

  Having murdered my mother under circumstances of singular atrocity, I was arrested and put upon my trial, which lasted seven years. In charging the jury, the judge of the Court of Acquittal remarked that it was one of the most ghastly crimes that he had ever been called upon to explain a ...

• My Favourite Murder

  Having murdered my mother under circumstances of singular atrocity, I was arrested and put upon trial, which lasted seven years. In summing up, the judge of the Court of Acquittal remarked that it was one of the most ghastly crimes that he had ever been called upon to explain away.

• Night Doings At 'Deadman's', The

  A Story that is Untrue

• Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An    

  A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack feel to the ...

• Oil of Dog    

  My name is Boffer Bings. I was born of honest parents in one of the humbler walks of life, my father being a manufacturer of dog-oil and my mother having a small studio in the shadow of the village church, where she disposed of unwelcome babes. In my boyhood I was trained to habits of i ...

• Old Man Eckert's, At

  Philip Eckert lived for many years in an old, weather-stained wooden house about three miles from the little town of Marion, in Vermont. There must be quite a number of persons living who remember him, not unkindly, I trust, and know something of the story that I am about to tell.

• On a Mountain

  They say that the lumberman has looked upon the Cheat Mountain country and seen that it is good, and I hear that some wealthy gentlemen have been there and made a game preserve. There must be lumber and, I suppose, sport, but some things one could wish were ordered otherwise. Looking back upon ...

• One Kind of Officer

  "Captain Ransome, it is not permitted to you to know anything. It is sufficient that you obey my order--which permit me to repeat. If you perceive any movement of troops in your front you are to open fire, and if attacked hold this position as long as you can. Do I make myself understood, sir?"< ...

• One Of The Missing

  Jerome Searing, a private soldier of General Sherman's army, then confronting the enemy at and about Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, turned his back upon a small group of officers with whom he had been talking in low tones, stepped across a light line of earthworks, and disappeared in a forest. Non ...

• One Of Twins

  A Letter found among the Papers of the late Mortimer Barr

• One Officer, One Man

  Captain Graffenreid stood at the head of his company. The regiment was not engaged. It formed a part of the front line-of-battle, which stretched away to the right with a visible length of nearly two miles through the open ground. The left flank was veiled by woods; to the right also the line w ...

• One Summer Night

  The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince. That he really was buried, the testimony of his senses compelled him to admit. His posture -- flat upon his back, with his hands crossed upon his stomach and ...

• Other Lodgers, The

  "In order to take that train," said Colonel Levering, sitting in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, "you will have to remain nearly all night in Atlanta. That is a fine city, but I advise you not to put up at the Breathitt House, one of the principal hotels. It is an old wooden building in urge ...

• Parker Adderson, Philosopher    

  "Prisoner, what is your name?"

• Present at a Hanging

  An old man named Daniel Baker, living near Lebanon, Iowa, was suspected by his neighbors of having murdered a peddler who had obtained permission to pass the night at his house. This was in 1853, when peddling was more common in the Western country than it is now, and was attended with c ...

• Psychological Shipwreck, A

  In the summer of 1874 I was in Liverpool, whither I had gone on business for the mercantile house of Bronson & Jarrett, New York. I am William Jarrett; my partner was Zenas Bronson. The firm failed last year, and unable to endure the fall from affluence to poverty he died.

• Realm Of The Unreal, The

  I

• Resumed Identity, A

  One summer night a man stood on a low hill overlooking a wide expanse of forest and field. By the full moon hanging low in the west he knew what he might not have known otherwise: that it was near the hour of dawn. A light mist lay along the earth, partly veiling the lower features of the landsc ...

• Secret Of Macarger's Gulch, The    

  Northwestwardly from Indian Hill, about nine miles as the crow flies, is Macarger's Gulch. It is not much of a gulch -- a mere depression between two wooded ridges of inconsiderable height. From its mouth up to its head -- for gulches, like rivers, have an anatomy of their own -- the dist ...

• Son of the Gods, A

  A breezy day and a sunny landscape. An open country to right and left and forward; behind, a wood. In the edge of this wood, facing the open but not venturing into it, long lines of troops, halted. The wood is alive with them, and full of confused noises--the occasional rattle of wheels as a bat ...

• Spook House, The

  On the road leading north from Manchester, in eastern Kentucky, to Booneville, twenty miles away, stood, in 1862, a wooden plantation house of a somewhat better quality than most of the dwellings in that region. The house was destroyed by fire in the year following- -probably by some str ...

• Staley Fleming's Hallucination

  Of two men who were talking one was a physician.

• Story of a Conscience, The

  Captain Parrol Hartroy stood at the advanced post of his picket-guard, talking in low tones with the sentinel. This post was on a turnpike which bisected the captain's camp, a half-mile in rear, though the camp was not in sight from that point. The officer was apparently giving the soldier certa ...

• Stranger, The    

  A man stepped out of the darkness into the little illuminated circle about our failing camp-fire and seated himself upon a rock.

• Thing at Nolan, The

  To the south of where the road between Leesville and Hardy, in the State of Missouri, crosses the east fork of May Creek stands an abandoned house. Nobody has lived in it since the summer of 1879, and it is fast going to pieces. For some three years before the date mentioned above, it w ...

• Three and One are One

  In the year 1861 Barr Lassiter, a young man of twenty-two, lived with his parents and an elder sister near Carthage, Tennessee. The family were in somewhat humble circumstances, subsisting by cultivation of a small and not very fertile plantation. Owning no slaves, they were not rated among "th ...

• Tough Tussle, A

  One night in the autumn of 1861 a man sat alone in the heart of a forest in western Virginia. The region was one of the wildest on the continent -- the Cheat Mountain country. There was no lack of people close at hand, however; within a mile of where the man sat was the now silent camp of ...

• Two Military Executions

  In the spring of the year 1862 General Buell's big army lay in camp, licking itself into shape for the campaign which resulted in the victory at Shiloh. It was a raw, untrained army, although some of its fractions had seen hard enough service, with a good deal of fighting, in the mountains of W ...

• Unfinished Race, An

  James Burne Worson was a shoemaker who lived in Leamington, Warwickshire, England. He had a little shop in one of the by-ways leading off the road to Warwick. In his humble sphere he was esteemed an honest man, although like many of his class in English towns he was somewhat addicted to ...

• Vine on a House, A    

  About three miles from the little town of Norton, in Missouri, on the road leading to Maysville, stands an old house that was last occupied by a family named Harding. Since 1886 no one has lived in it, nor is anyone likely to live in it again. Time and the disfavor of persons dwelling t ...

• Watcher By The Dead, A

  In an upper room of an unoccupied dwelling in that part of San Francisco known as North Beach lay the body of a man under a sheet. The hour was near nine in the evening; the room was dimly lighted by a single candle. Although the weather was warm, the two windows, contrary to the custom which gi ...

• What I Saw of Shiloh

  I

• What Occurred at Franklin

  For several days, in snow and rain, General Schofield's little army had crouched in its hastily constructed defenses at Columbia, Tennessee. It had retreated in hot haste from Pulaski, thirty miles to the south, arriving just in time to foil Hood, who, marching from Florence, Alabama, by anothe ...

• Wireless Message, A    

  In the summer of 1896 Mr. William Holt, a wealthy manufacturer of Chicago, was living temporarily in a little town of central New York, the name of which the writer's memory has not retained. Mr. Holt had had "trouble with his wife," from whom he had parted a year before. Whether the tr ...

About the Author

"Bitter Bierce" - American newspaper columnist, satirist, essayist, short-story writer, and novelist, who disappeared in the Mexicon Revolution. His end is still a mystery, but he is presumed to have died in the siege of Ojinega on 11 January 1914. Bierce is best-known for his numerous short stories collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891), which show the influence of Edgar Allan Poe.

Bierce was born in Meigs County, Ohio, as the tenth of thirteen children. While a teenager, Bierce lived on a farm in northern Indiana. After studying a year in a high school Birce became a printer's apprentice on The Northern Indianan, an antislavery paper. In 1861 he enlisted in the army and served as an officer until 1865 in the Union Army during the American Civil War - an experience that marked him for life. Bierce was a topographical officer on General William B. Hazen's staff and fought in several battles including the one that later provided the setting for 'Chickamauga' (1889), one of his best stories. It told about a little boy who sees the pitifully mangled survivors of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. After the war he settled in San Francisco. He found employment at the U.S. Sub-Treasury and began his journalistic career. Bierce contributed to a number of periodicals, among others the Overland Monthly and the Californian. In 1868 he became the editor of the News Letter. His first story, 'The Haunted Valley', appeared in 1871 in the Overland Monthly.

After his marriage to a wealthy miner's daughter, Bierce went to England, where he lived from 1872 to 1875 and wrote for the London magazines Figaro and Fun. During this time he published three volumes of sketches and epigrams, The Fiend's Delight (1872), Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California (1872), and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874). Tales of Soldiers and Civilians included Bierce's most celebrated tale, 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge'. It featured a man who thinks he has escaped from an execution by hanging and returned to his wife at his plantation, but this is merely a drawn-out hallucination occuring in the split second prior to his death.

In 1877 Bierce worked as an associate editor of the San Francisco Argonaut. In the late 1870s he tried his luck in the mining business in the Dakota Teritory without success, and returned to San Francisco to work for the Wasp. Bierce joined later the San Francisco Examiner, which started his long career as a columnist and contributor to the Hearst publications. Between the years 1887 and 1906 Bierce wrote his famous column "The Prattler", which was a mixture of literary gossip, epigrams, and stories. His sardonic and cruel epigrams and aphorisms Bierce gathered in The Cynic's Word Book (1906). When he edited his twelve-volume Collected Works (1909-1912), however, he changed the title of this work to The Devil's Dictionary (1911). Although Bierce was called "wicked" and "devilish", behind the misanthropic facade was a disappointed idealist, who saw a saint as "a dead sinner revised and edited", and a marriage "a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two." Bierce's satires have much in common with the views of Swift and Voltaire, whom he had read. Bierce also confessed his debt to Stoicism, the especially praised Epictetus.

In 1896 Bierce moved to Washington, D.C., and contributed to the New York Journal, the San Francisco Examiner, and Cosmopolitan magazine. He divorced in 1904 and broke completely with his family. Gradually he lost touch with his friends. From 1900 to 1913 Bierce lived and worked mainly in Washington.

Late in 1913, at the age of seventy-one, Bierce retired from writing and went to Mexico, to seek "the good, kind darkness." He vanished mysteriously during the Civil War. A fictional account of his last days is given in the novel The Old Gringo (1985) by Carlos Fuentes. The book was adapted into screen in 1989 and directed by Luis Punzo, starring Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck. - According to one explanation by Roy Morris (and others) Bierce did not go to Mexico at all but, instead, committed suicide in the Grand Canyon.

In South America Ambrose Bierce has influenced Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar. Japanese author Akutagawa Ryunosuke has also expressed indebtedness to Bierce.

Author biographies courtesy of Author's Calendar. Used with permission.