Fiction · 1891
In the Midst of Life
Twenty-six stories collected under the title Bierce gave them for the book's first edition — tales of soldiers, mostly drawn from his own service in the Union Army through some of the Civil War's bloodiest fighting, and tales of civilians, ranging into the ghost story and the darkly comic tall tale. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" follows a Confederate saboteur's escape from hanging in his own final seconds of consciousness; "Chickamauga" follows a small child, deaf and wandering, through a battlefield's aftermath he is too young to understand; "The Coup de Grâce" and "A Horseman in the Sky" find war's cruelty in the space between duty and mercy. Bierce's prose is famously spare and exact, and his endings — twist, irony, or simple horror — are frequently ranked among the most effective in American short fiction.
Bierce's collection was first published in 1891 as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, and reissued in 1898 under the title In the Midst of Life, by which it has been known since.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text of all twenty-six stories, together with Bierce's own preface to the first edition.
Contents
- Preface
- A Horseman in the Sky
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
- I
- II
- III
- 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
- I — Concerning the Wish to Be Dead
- II — How to Say What Is Worth Hearing
- III — The Fighting of One Whose Heart Was Not in the Quarrel
- IV — The Great Honor the Great
- The Story of a Conscience
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- One Kind of Officer
- I — Of the Uses of Civility
- II — Under What Circumstances Men Do Not Wish to Be Shot
- III — How to Play the Cannon Without Notes
- IV — To Introduce General Masterson
- V — How Sounds Can Fight Shadows
- VI — Why, Being Affronted by A, It Is Not Best to Affront B
- One Officer, One Man
- George Thurston
- The Mocking-Bird
- The Man Out of the Nose
- An Adventure at Brownville
- The Famous Gilson Bequest
- The Applicant
- A Watcher by the Dead
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- The Man and the Snake
- II
- III
- IV
- A Holy Terror
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- The Suitable Surroundings
- The Boarded Window
- A Lady from Redhorse
- The Eyes of the Panther
- I — One Does Not Always Marry When Insane
- II — A Room May Be Too Narrow for Three, Though One Is Outside
- III — The Theory of the Defense
- IV — An Appeal to the Conscience of God
New editions
Never lose your place.
This book is free to read in full, and stays that way. Leave an address: one click confirms it and opens a free account, so your progress and bookmarks sync across every device. You'll also hear when the next restored edition enters the archive. Terminate at any time.
Subjects
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source mind
About the author
1842–1914 · Victorian
Ambrose Bierce (1842–c. 1914) was born in Meigs County, Ohio, and enlisted in the Union Army at nineteen, seeing heavy combat at Shiloh and Chickamauga and suffering a severe head wound at Kennesaw Mountain in 1864. After the war he settled in San Francisco and built a long career in journalism, much of it as a columnist for William Randolph Hearst's papers, where his caustic wit earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce." His Civil War stories, including "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," were collected as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891), and his satirical lexicon, serialized in newspapers from 1881, was published in book form in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book before appearing under its now-familiar title, The Devil's Dictionary, in 1911. In late 1913, in his early seventies, he traveled to Mexico, then in the midst of revolution, reportedly to observe Pancho Villa's army; he was last heard from in a letter dated December 1913, and neither his fate nor his remains were ever confirmed.
Adjacent records
