Ebook Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce: Text, Summary, Motifs and Notes (Annotated)

Ambrose Bierce was an American newspaperman, satirist, and short story writer. He disappeared in Mexico in 1914 and his final fate is unknown.


Ambrose Bierce, in full Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce, Gwinnett also spelled Gwinett (see Researcher’s Note), (born June 24, 1842, Meigs county, Ohio, U.S.—died 1914, Mexico?), American newspaperman, wit, satirist, and author of sardonic short stories based on themes of death and horror. His life ended in an unsolved mystery.

Reared in Kosciusko county, Indiana, Bierce became a printer’s devil (apprentice) on a Warsaw, Indiana, paper after about a year in high school. In 1861 he enlisted in the 9th Indiana Volunteers and fought in a number of American Civil War battles, including Shiloh and Chickamauga. After being seriously wounded in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in 1864, he served until January 1865, and he received a merit promotion to major in 1867.


Resettling in San Francisco, which was experiencing an artistic renaissance, he began contributing to periodicals, particularly the News Letter, of which he became editor in 1868. Bierce was soon the literary arbiter of the West Coast. The Haunted Valley (1871) was his first story. In December 1871 he married Mary Ellen Day, and from 1872 to 1875 the Bierces lived in England, where he wrote for the London magazines Fun and Figaro, edited the Lantern for the exiled French empress Eugénie, and published three books, The Fiend’s Delight (1872), Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California (1872), and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874).


In 1877 he became associate editor of the San Francisco Argonaut but left it in 1879–80 for an unsuccessful try at placer mining in Rockerville in the Dakota Territory. Thereafter he was editor of the San Francisco Illustrated Wasp for five years. In 1887 he joined the staff of William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, for which he wrote the “Prattler” column. In 1896 Bierce moved to Washington, D.C., where he continued newspaper and magazine writing. In 1913, tired of American life, he went to Mexico, then in the middle of a revolution led by Pancho Villa. His end is a mystery, but a reasonable conjecture is that he was killed in the siege of Ojinaga in January 1914.

This collection includes the following:

I.    Introduction
II.    The Fiend’s Delight
III.    The Land Beyond the Blow
IV.    Cobwebs from an Empty Skull
V.    Can Such Things Be?
VI.    Tales of Soldiers and Civilians
VII.    Fantastic Fables
VIII.    Present at a Hanging
IX.    Negligible Tales
X.    The Parenticide Club
XI.    The Fourth Estate
XII.    The Ocean Wave
XIII.    “On with the Dance!”
XIV.    Epigrams
XV.    Ashes of the Beacon
XVI.    Working for an Empress
XVII.    Across the Plains
XVIII.    The Mirage
XIX.    A Sole Survivor
XX.    The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 1
XXI.    The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 2
XXII.    The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 3
XXIII.    The Devil’s Dictionary
XXIV.    The collected works of Ambrose Bierce