Happy Birthday, Ambrose Bierce

Bierce’s father had the largest library in the county, and when Bierce dropped out of high school—he was not one for groups—he spent much time there. It is hard to disagree with a recent biographer who sees the library as having saved Bierce from being the serial killer type, or having turned him into the prose version of it.

The cap to Bierce’s legendary life is the drama of his mysterious death: at age seventy-one, he perhaps died while attempting to get close to Pancho Villa’s army in Mexico, perhaps as a suicide in the Grand Canyon. Either theory might convey the impression that the cynicism by which Bierce won fame also killed him.

Today in Literature