The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs
Edition: Second printing
Series: Library of America, 219
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 891
ISBN-13: 9781598531022
Copyright date: 2011
Description: 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.
Table of contents: title: In the Midst of Life (Tale of Soldiers and Civilians); title: Soldiers; title: A Horseman in the Sky; title: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge; title: Chickamauga; title: A Son of the Gods; title: One of the Missing; title: Killed at Resaca; title: The Affair at Coulter’s Notch; title: The Coup de Grâce; title: Parker Adderson, Philosopher; title: An Affair of Outposts; title: The Story of a Conscience; title: One Kind of Officer; title: One Officer, One Man; title: George Thurston; title: The Mocking-Bird; title: Civilians; title: The Man Out of the Nose; title: An Adventure at Brownville; title: The Famous Gilson Bequest; title: The Applicant; title: A Watcher by the Dead; title: The Man and the Snake; title: A Holy Terror; title: The Suitable Surroundings; title: The Boarded Window; title: A Lady from Red Horse; title: The Eyes of the Panther; title: Can Such Things Be?; title: Can Such Things Be?; title: The Death of Halpin Frayser; title: The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch; title: One Summer Night; title: The Moonlit Road; title: A Diagnosis of Death; title: Moxon’s Master; title: A Tough Tussle; title: One of Twins; title: The Haunted Valley; title: A Jug of Sirup; title: Staley Fleming’s Hallucination; title: A Resumed Identity; title: A Baby Tramp; title: The Night-Doings at “Deadman’s”; title: Beyond the Wall; title: A Psychological Shipwreck; title: The Middle Toe of the Right Foot; title: John Mortonson’s Funeral; title: The Realm of the Unreal; title: John Bartine’s Watc; title: The Damned Thing; title: Haýýti the Shepherd; title: An Inhabitant of Carcosa; title: The Stranger; title: The Ways of Ghosts; title: Present at a Hanging; title: A Cold Greeting; title: A Wireless Message; title: An Arrest; title: Soldier-Folk; title: A Man with Two Lives; title: Three and One Are One; title: A Baffled Ambuscade; title: Two Military Executions; title: Some Haunted Houses; title: The Isle of Pines; title: A Fruitless Assignment; title: A Vine on a House; title: At Old Man Eckert’s; title: The Spook House; title: The Other Lodgers; title: The Thing at Nolan; title: “Mysterious Disappearances”; title: The Difficulty of Crossing a Field; title: An Unfinished Race; title: Charles Ashmore’s Trail; title: The Devil’s Dictionary; title: Bits of Autobiography; title: On a Mountain; title: What I Saw of Shiloh; title: A Little of Chickamauga; title: The Crime at Pickett’s Mill; title: Four Days in Dixie; title: What Occurred at Franklin; title: ’Way Down in Alabam’; title: Working for an Empress; title: Across the Plains; title: The Mirage; title: A Sole Survivor; title: Selected Stories; title: Mrs. Dennison’s Head; title: The Man Overboard; title: Jupiter Doke, Brigadier-General; title: A Bottomless Grave; title: For the Ahkoond; title: My Favorite Murder; title: Oil of Dog; title: Ashes of the Beacon