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A veteran of some of the bloodiest battles of the civil War—among them Shiloh, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Kennesaw Mountain—Ambrose Bierce went on to become one of the darkest and most death-haunted of American writers, the blackest of black humorists. A prolific journalist who made himself a dominant figure in the emerging literary culture of postwar san Francisco, Bierce developed a style of slashing sarcasm that made him a feared antagonist. As a short story writer—whether drawing on wartime experiences or exploring realms of supernatural and psychological horror—he used extreme situations to give voice to his uniquely engrossing brand of pessimism.
This volume gathers the most celebrated and significant of Bierce’s writings. In the Midst of Life (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians), his collection of short fiction about the Civil War, which includes the masterpieces “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “Chickamauga,” is suffused with a fiercely ironic sense of the horror and randomness of war. Close-up portraits of life in camp and on the battlefield offer unique, often startling, perspectives on the war whose after-echoes pervade Bierce’s writing.
Can Such Things Be? brings together “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” “The Damned Thing,” “The Moonlit Road,” and other tales of terror that make Bierce the genre’s most significant American practitioner between Poe and Lovecraft. These tales are notable, in editor S. T. Joshi’s words, for “the meticulous etching of the precise effects of the supernatural upon the sensitive consciousness of his fear-raddled protagonists.”
The Devil’s Dictionary, the brilliant lexicon of subversively cynical definitions on which Bierce worked for decades, displays to the full his corrosive wit.
In Bits of Autobiography, the series of memoirs that includes the memorable “What I Saw of Shiloh,” he recreates his experiences in the war and its aftermath. The volume is rounded out with a selection of the best stories not gathered in the two major collections. Acclaimed Bierce scholar Joshi provides detailed notes and a newly researched chronology of Bierce’s life and mysterious disappearance.
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Subjects
Social life and customs, Humor, Journalists, Vocabulary, American Short stories, Dictionaries, English language, Fiction, American Authors, Personal narratives, Semantics, Biography, History, American wit and humor, Fiction, short stories (single author), Bierce, ambrose, 1842-1914, United States Civil War, 1861-1865, Classic Literature, Short Stories, hanging, Confederacy, Union, American fiction, manners and customs, literature, American literature, werepanthers, spirit possession, panthers, American fiction (fictional works by one author), Juvenile audience, civil war, American Civil War, Confederate States of America, horror tales, horror, inquests, coroners, mountain lions, first-person narrative, lynx, owls, Criticism and interpretation, Paranormal fiction, Récits d'horreur, Nouvelles américaines, Fiction, horrorPeople
Peyton Farquhar, Irene Marlowe, Jenner Brenning, Charles Marlowe, Dr. Helberson, Dr. Mancher, Hugh Morgan, William HarkerPlaces
United States, Alabama, Owl Creek Bridge, San Francisco, CarcosaTimes
19th centuryShowing 1 featured edition. View all 1 editions?
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1
The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs
2011, Library of America
Hardcover
in English
- Second printing
1598531026 9781598531022
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Book Details
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marc_openlibraries_sanfranciscopubliclibrary MARC recordBetter World Books record
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Work Description
Contains:
In the Midst of Life (Tale of Soldiers and Civilians)
Soldiers
A Horseman in the Sky
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Chickamauga
A Son of the Gods
One of the Missing
Killed at Resaca
The Affair at Coulter’s Notch
The Coup de Grâce
Parker Adderson, Philosopher
An Affair of Outposts
The Story of a Conscience
One Kind of Officer
One Officer, One Man
George Thurston
The Mocking-Bird
Civilians
The Man Out of the Nose
An Adventure at Brownville
The Famous Gilson Bequest
The Applicant
Watcher by the Dead
The Man and the Snake
A Holy Terror
The Suitable Surroundings
The Boarded Window
A Lady from Red Horse
The Eyes of the Panther
Can Such Things Be?
Can Such Things Be?
The Death of Halpin Frayser
The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch
One Summer Night
The Moonlit Road
A Diagnosis of Death
Moxon’s Master
A Tough Tussle
One of Twins
The Haunted Valley
A Jug of Sirup
Staley Fleming’s Hallucination
A Resumed Identity
A Baby Tramp
The Night-Doings at “Deadman’s”
Beyond the Wall
A Psychological Shipwreck
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot
John Mortonson’s Funeral
The Realm of the Unreal
John Bartine’s Watc
Damned Thing
Haýýti the Shepherd
Inhabitant of Carcosa
The Stranger
The Ways of Ghosts
Present at a Hanging
A Cold Greeting
A Wireless Message
An Arrest
Soldier-Folk
A Man with Two Lives
Three and One Are One
A Baffled Ambuscade
Two Military Executions
Some Haunted Houses
The Isle of Pines
A Fruitless Assignment
A Vine on a House
At Old Man Eckert’s
The Spook House
The Other Lodgers
The Thing at Nolan
“Mysterious Disappearances”
The Difficulty of Crossing a Field
An Unfinished Race
Charles Ashmore’s Trail
The Devil’s Dictionary
Bits of Autobiography
On a Mountain
What I Saw of Shiloh
A Little of Chickamauga
The Crime at Pickett’s Mill
Four Days in Dixie
What Occurred at Franklin
’Way Down in Alabam’
Working for an Empress
Across the Plains
The Mirage
A Sole Survivor
Selected Stories
Mrs. Dennison’s Head
The Man Overboard
Jupiter Doke, Brigadier-General
A Bottomless Grave
For the Ahkoond
My Favorite Murder
Oil of Dog
Ashes of the Beacon
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