When an author has only a brief period of notice then vanishes when he fails to measure up to the likes of Longfellow, Melville, or O Henry, there are several reasons for this. Bierce who served as a Union soldier during the Civil War was deeply impacted by the war. With an already morose personality before the war, his experiences deepened a pessimistic outlook on life. Hence all of his stories reflected the pessimism. His work enjoyed a brief window of fame then flamed out & forgotten except for a few who favored his work. Poe remained above him on a far longer stage even though Poe's work was similar in genre. It is noted that the satire of the Devils Dictionary is rich with innuendo & his memoirs of his Union soldier days remain relevant. The rest sadly has sunk to obscurity. At least, LOA has preserved much of Bierce's work. ( )

Bits of Autobiography ***** - first hand accounts of some of the worst of the Civil War. Seemingly the bedrock for his short fiction & overall pragmatic outlook. 3/21

A veteran of some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, Ambrose Bierce went on to become one of the darkest and most death haunted of American writers, the blackest of black humorists. 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. 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. 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 his best uncollected stories. Acclaimed Bierce scholar S. T. Joshi provides detailed notes and a newly researched chronology of Bierce's life and mysterious disappearance.