An Occurence At Owl Creek Brid Essay, Research Paper

Ambrose Bierce was born in Meiggs County, Ohio. He served throughout the Civil War, was brevetted major for distinguished services. After the war, he went to San Francisco, where he held editorial positions on several San Francisco weeklies. In 1872, he went to London and there for four years he continued his journalistic career. His first literary work appeared while he was abroad. He returned in 1876 to San Francisco and for nearly all of the next twenty-one years he worked for newspapers. Mr. George Sterling says of Bierce: “By far the greater part this work was polemical in its nature. . . . Bierce’s pen was dipped in wormwood and acid, and . . . his assaults were more dreaded than the bowie knife and revolver. . . .” The story by Bierce represented here was taken from his volume Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, and it is interesting to see what the author wrote as a prefatory note. “Denied existence by the chief publishing houses of the country, this book owes itself to Mr. E. L. G. Steele, merchant, of this city. In attesting Mr. Steele’s faith in his judgment and his friend, it will serve its author’s main and best ambition. A. B., San Francisco, Sept. 4, 1891.” His stories deal with the horrible and the gruesome or the supernatural. We may hate his stories, as Mr. Sterling says, but we cannot forget them. “His heroes, or rather victims, are lonely men, passing to unpredictable dooms, and hearing, from inaccessible crypts of space, the voices of unseen malevolences.” In November, 1913, Bierce left San Francisco and went to Mexico. For a number of years there was no word whatever about him. But it now seems clearly certain that he was shot in 1914 by one or another of the revolutionary factions in Mexico