DESCRIBED AS AMERICA’S GREATEST writer of horror fiction between Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose (Gwinnett) Bierce (1842–1914?) was born in Meigs County, Ohio, and grew up in Indiana with his mother and eccentric father; he was the tenth of thirteen children, all of whose names began with the letter “A.” When the Civil War broke out, he volunteered and was soon commissioned a first lieutenant in the Union Army, seeing action in the Battle of Shiloh.
It seems that his entire life and every word he wrote was dark and cynical, earning him the sobriquet “Bitter Bierce.” He became one of the most important and influential journalists in America, writing columns for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. His darkest book may be the devastating Devil’s Dictionary (1906), in which he defined a saint as “a dead sinner revised and edited,” befriend as “to make an ingrate,” and birth as “the first and direst of all disasters.” His most famous story is “An Occurrence at Owls Creek Bridge,” in which a condemned prisoner believes he has been reprieved—just before the rope snaps his neck. It was filmed three times and was twice made for television, by Rod Serling and by Alfred Hitchcock.
In 1913, he accompanied Pancho Villa’s army as an observer. He wrote a letter to a friend dated December 26, 1913. He then vanished—one of the most famous disappearances in history.
“The Moonlit Road” was first published in book form in Can Such Things Be? (New York, Cassell, 1893).