An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio. His parents were farmers, and he was the tenth of thirteen children, all of whom were given names beginning with “A.” In 1846 the family moved to Indiana, where Bierce attended primary and secondary school. He entered the Kentucky Military Institute in 1859 and at the outbreak of the Civil War enlisted in the Union Army, serving in such units as the Ninth Indiana Infantry Regiment and Buell’s Army of the Ohio. Bierce fought in numerous military engagements, including the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga and in Sherman’s March to the Sea. After the war, Bierce traveled with a military expedition to San Francisco, where he left the army in 1867.

Bierce’s early poetry and prose appeared in the Californian magazine. In 1868 he was hired as the editor of the News Letter, for which he wrote his famous “Town Crier” column. Bierce became a noted figure in California literary society, establishing friendships with Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Joaquin Miller. In 1872 Bierce moved to England, where during a three-year stay he wrote for Fun and Figaro magazines and acquired the nickname “Bitter Bierce.” His first three book of sketches, Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California (1872), The Fiend’s Delight (1873), and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874) were published during this period. He returned to San Francisco and worked in a government mint office for one year before becoming associate editor of the Argonaut.

Bierce worked for a mining company in South Dakota for two years, but he returned to the city in 1881 to become editor of the weekly Wasp. In 1887 Bierce began writing for media mogul William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, continuing the “Prattler” column he had done for the Argonaut and Wasp. This provided him with a regular outlet for his essays, epigrams, and many of the short stories subsequently collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891 and Can Such Things Be? in 1893. A committed opponent of hypocrisy, prejudice, and corruption, Bierce acquired fame as a journalist, becoming an admired but often hated public figure, a man of contradiction and mystery. In 1914 he informed some of his correspondents that he intended to travel to Mexico to join Poncho Villa’s forces as an observer during that country’s civil war. He was never heard from again, and the circumstances of his death are uncertain.