1842–1914?
“Bitter Bierce,” they called him, for his gloomy view of humanity. In one portrait, he leans against a mantel beside a skull whose stare can’t match his own thoughtful frown. Skepticism and pessimism have seldom been more entertaining than in Bierce’s brilliant satirical volume The Devil’s Dictionary. Its hundreds of entries grew out of his newspaper columns and first appeared in 1906 as The Cynic’s Word Book. Consider his definition of infidel: “In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.” And, as quoted earlier in The Phantom Coach, there is Bierce’s fine definition of a ghost: “The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.”
Born in Ohio, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce spent his adolescence in Indiana and his early adulthood managing a mine in the Dakotas. He served with distinction in the Civil War, fought at both Kennesaw Mountain and Shiloh, rescued a wounded comrade under fire, and suffered a severe head wound that kept him out of combat for only a few months before he returned. He edited various newspapers and magazines. He wrote for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, then continued the association from Washington, DC.
Not surprisingly, the man who described a novel as “a short story padded” wrote elegant, economical stories. Probably his best known are “Chickamauga” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” either of which if published now would be called postmodern. A year after “Owl Creek,” in the December 19, 1891, issue of Wave, came another enduring story, a creepy oedipal vampire tale called “The Death of Halpin Frayser.” Two years later he reprinted all three in a collection with the perfect title Can Such Things Be? He also wrote poetry and essays.
In October 1913, at the age of seventy-one, Bierce decided to visit Mexico to learn more about its revolution and to interview the outlaw and revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. Along the way he visited the sites of his war experience. Traveling via Chattanooga and New Orleans, he crossed over the Rio Bravo into Ciudad Juárez in late November. The day after Christmas 1913, Bierce wrote to his secretary from Chihuahua, stating his plan to travel to where Pancho Villa was supposedly planning to attack troops. Bierce was never heard from again. His disappearance without a trace has piqued the imagination of other writers ever since. Bierce appears in numerous fantasy and science fiction stories, as well as in a series of detective novels. Even Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes couldn’t resist the mystique; Bierce is a central character in his 1985 novel The Old Gringo. One of Gregory Peck’s last roles was playing Bierce in the 1989 film version.
“The Moonlit Road” was first published in the January 1907 issue of Cosmopolitan.