Journalist, short story writer, poet, and critic Ambrose Bierce has been called one of America’s greatest wits and an uncompromising satirist. He wrote unsparingly and with haunting realism of his Civil War experiences. His finest and most famous Civil War writings are gathered in this volume of six essays and twenty stories, including ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, ‘ ‘What I Saw of Shiloh, ‘ and ‘A Horseman in the Sky.’ Edited and introduced by William Mc Cann, this annotated Warbler Classics edition also includes a detailed biographical timeline of Bierce’s extraordinary life.
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Contents
Introduction vii
War Memoirs
On a Mountain 1
What I Saw of Shiloh 6
A Little of Chickamauga 23
The Crime at Pickett’s Mill 28
Four Days in Dixie 37
What Occurred at Franklin 46
A Bivouac of the Dead 53
War Stories
A Horseman in the Sky 55
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge 62
Chickamauga 72
A Son of the Gods 79
One of the Missing 86
Killed at Resaca 98
The Affair at Coulter’s Notch 105
The Coup de Grâce 114
Parker Adderson, Philosopher 120
An Affair of Outposts 127
The Story of a Conscience 137
One Kind of Office 144
One Officer, One Man 154
George Thurston 160
The Mocking-Bird 165
Three and One Are One 171
A Baffled Ambuscade 174
Two Military Executions 177
A Resumed Identity 180
Jupiter Doke, Brigadier-General 186
Biographical Timeline 195
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Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913?) was one of the leading men of letters in nineteenth-century America and a Civil War veteran. He served as a first lieutenant in the Union Army’s 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. After the war he became a regular columnist at The San Francisco Examiner and one of the most influential journalists on the West Coast. In addition to his journalistic work, he wrote piercingly about the ghastly things he had seen in the war and was a pioneer of the psychological horror story. At the age of seventy-one Bierce disappeared while joining Pancho Villa’s army as an observer of the Mexican Revolution, and, in spite of multiple investigations, his ultimate fate remains unknown.