Ambrose Bierce

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.