Ambrose Bierce is as famous for the circumstances surrounding the end of his life as for his bitter fatalistic prose.  Bierce was a journalist/author and a Civil War veteran.  In 1913, after the breakup of his marriage and the death of his sons, he set out for Mexico to meet Pancho Villa and observe the Mexican Revolution at first hand.  He wrote to a friend:

    Goodbye, if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please
    know that I think it a pretty good way to depart this life.  It beats old age, disease, or falling down
    the cellar stairs.  To be a Gringo in Mexico--ah, that is euthanasia!

With that, he disappeared into Mexico and was never heard from again, fueling wild speculation about his fate (i.e., Carols Fuentes' novel The Old Gringo).  A fitting end for an author whose works combined a bleak view of life with elements of mystery.

Bierce's Civil War stories are bleak little tales of death and destruction.  There's one here that nicely captures his cynical world view--most of us saw a film version of it in grade school--An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.  Peyton Farquhar is a Southern planter captured behind Union lines on a spy mission.  As the story opens, he stands upon Owl Creek Bridge with a noose around his neck thinking of the wife and children he will never see again.  But when the Union soldiers try to hang him, the noose slips and he swims off downstream.  He flees across country until he finally reaches home and as he approaches his open armed wife...the rope snaps tight and we realize that he had imagined the whole episode on his way down.  Here in one tidy package is the brutality of war, the futility of life and the bitter wit that characterizes his work.

He's not for all tastes, and I'm not generally big on short stories, but I like him.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (B) Orrin C. Judd

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