Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (Meigs, Ohio, United States, June 24, 1842-Chihuahua, 1914) was an American editor, journalist, writer and satirist. He wrote the short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and compiled the satirical lexicon, the Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic and his sardonic view of human nature in his work earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce.".

Bierce employed a distinctive style of writing, especially in his stories. Her style often encompasses an abrupt beginning, dark imagery, vague references to time, limited descriptions, impossible events, and the theme of war.

In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He was rumored to be traveling with rebel troops, and was not seen again.

Childhood and adolescence

Bierce was born in a cabin on Horse Cave Creek, in Meigs County, Ohio, and grew up in Kosciusko County, Indiana, Indiana. He was the tenth of twelve children. Their parents, Marcus Aurelius and Laura Sherwood Bierce, farmers of deep Calvinist faith, gave them all names that began with the letter "A": Amos, Andrew, Augustus, Ambrose... While Marcus Aurelius, a farmer without fortune, She suffered from an extravagant and apathetic character, who preferred to spend her time reading the Bible and Lord Byron. It was her mother, a temperamental and domineering woman, who was in charge of supporting the entire family.

In that puritan environment full of repression and prejudice, almost all the brothers acquired a difficult and sinuous character. Ambrose was not spared from this damage, in whom a visceral hatred was brewed towards his own family from which, for reasons unknown to us, only his brother Albert was freed. During these formative years, another of the brothers, in rebellion against that domestic authoritarianism, ran away from home to end up as an actor and fairground strongman, while a sister ended her days devoured by cannibals in Africa, where she had fled to act as a missionary.

Still a teenager, Ambrose had affairs with a woman over seventy years old, whom he himself would later define as "cultured and still attractive." Shortly after, in 1859, Bierce entered the Kentucky Military School, where his stay was cut short prematurely due to an accident, supposedly intentional, that ended up burning the establishment.

In the Civil War and military life

At the beginning of the American Civil War, on April 19, 1861, Bierce enlisted in the 9th Regiment of Indiana Infantry Volunteers. He began the campaign as a surveying officer to determine appropriate battlefields in General Willian Hazen's brigade of General Buell's Army of the Ohio (later Army of the Cumberland). That same year he fought in the Battle of Shiloh, a terrible experience that he later used in some of his stories.

He also participated in the siege of Corinth, the battle of Stones River, the Tullahoma campaign, and the battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga.

In 1864 he was with his unit, integrated into Sherman's Army, in the Atlanta campaign, fighting at Rocky Face Ridge, Resaca, and Kennesaw Mountain, being seriously wounded in the latter on June 27. In September 1864 he was again in combat, fighting in the Battle of Franklin, which earned him promotion to field captain (brevet), and in the Battle of Nashville, being discharged days later in January 1865, and obtaining the promotion to commander -major- in campaign.

Once the war was over, he was entrusted with the administration of the abandoned and captured assets in Selma (Alabama). In the summer of 1866 he participated with his former chief, General Hazan, in an expedition through the Indian territories, being assigned to Fort Laramie, and requested entry into the regular army. When the expedition returned to San Francisco at the end of the year, Bierce was accepted into the army, but not as captain, his rank at the end of the Civil War, which was what he expected, but as second lieutenant. He then renounced military life.

Marriage

In 1871 he married the beautiful Mary Ellen (Molly) Day, with whom he had three children: Day, Leigh and Helen. Despite the fame and fortune that followed the writer during his years of marriage, these would not bring the writer many happy moments: in 1888 he separated from him after discovering some compromising letters from an admirer to his wife. In 1904 he obtained a divorce.

Bierce survived his sons: one would die in a fight, and the other would die from alcoholism. He himself was sick all his life, as a result of asthma and the after-effects of his war wounds.

Journalism

After graduating, he became known as a journalist in San Francisco, where he collaborated in The Argonaut, The Overland Monthly and New Letters, of which he was appointed director in 1868. It is the time in which he became a good personal friend of Mark Twain, of whose fluid and expeditious way of writing he became an enthusiastic admirer.

From 1872 to 1875 he lived with Mary Ellen in London, where he wrote. Returning to the United States, he settled again in San Francisco, where he became a columnist and editor of the San Francisco Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst. Already the most famous writer on the West Coast, in 1889 he moved to Washington, D.C., but continued his relationship with Hearst's diaries until 1906.

Literary works

In London he wrote his first short stories, which appeared in magazines and later compiled in three volumes, which earned him a reputation as a caustic and biting humorist. His style is characterized by the constant use of irony. A misanthrope like Jonathan Swift, whom he so closely resembles, he expressed his pessimism in stories and short stories that have no excessive illusions about the essential goodness of man and woman. He also composed Fantastic Fables and an Amended Aesop, corrosive critiques of American political corruption. For example, "The legislator and the soap":

A member of the Kansas Legislature who crossed with a soap tablet passed by without recognizing it, but the soap insisted to stop and shake hands. Thinking he was in the enjoyment of his parliamentary immunity, the legislator gave him a cordial and intense handshake. Upon leaving him, he warned that a part of the soap had been attached to his fingers and, running very alarmed towards a stream, proceeded to wash them. In order to do so he was forced to rub both hands and when he finished washing them they were so white that he went into bed and sent a doctor.

Returning to San Francisco he became the arbiter of political and literary circles. He displayed his macabre humor in The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter (1892) and satirical wit in his book of verse Shapes of Clay (1903).

He is considered the direct literary heir of his compatriots Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. A first-rate storyteller, we owe him some of the best macabre stories in the history of literature: The Death of Halpin Frayser, The Cursed Thing, An Event on the Bridge Over the Owl River, An Inhabitant of Carcosa, A Terror sacred, The boarded window, etc. Bierce is the writer who much of the criticism places alongside Poe, Lovecraft and Maupassant in the pantheon of illustrious cultivators of the horror genre. Through his forceful filigrees, he demonstrated himself as an absolute master in the recreation of tense, unsettling atmospheres in the midst of which he suddenly detonates a "physical" horror, absorbing and ferocious.

Some elements of Bierce's work were taken by the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft to incorporate into his Cthulhu Mythos. This second author, in his work Supernatural Horror in Literature, essay included in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, He wrote of Bierce's stories that "there is an undeniable dark maleficence in all of them, and some remain true summits of American fantasy literature." Lovecraft dedicates about five or six pages (depending on the edition) of said essay to Bierce, to whom he attributes a place "closer to true greatness" than that occupied by the Irishman Fitz James O'Brien, on a scale occupied in its highest place by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. However, H. P. Lovecraft displays a great impartiality that makes him credible, not sparing disapproval such as describing Bierce's work as "somewhat irregular: many of his stories are evidently mechanistic and are marred by a carefree, artificial and vulgar, coming from journalistic styles" and others, although the general tone of the entire critical review is much more complimentary than negative. He also cites H. P. Lovecraft in relation to Bierce, the laudatory judgment of Samuel Loveman, "a contemporary poet and critic who knew Bierce personally."

Although Bierce is often pigeonholed as an author of horror stories, not all of his texts belong to that genre; On the other hand, his texts usually contain a strong dose of sarcasm or lucid irony, which often turns into sharp black humor through the use of the literary cliché of the world upside down. It is considered his best book In the middle of life , also known as Tales of soldiers and civilians , which includes his darkest stories. His best-known work is the Devil's Dictionary.

Disappearance

In October 1913, Bierce left Washington, D.C. to tour the former battlefields of the Civil War. In December he crossed into Mexico through El Paso, which was then under development. In Ciudad Juárez he joined Pancho Villa's army as an observer, reaching Chihuahua, where traces of him faded. The last action recorded was from a letter he wrote to a friend, dated December 26th. This is one of the most famous disappearances in the history of literature: H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth refer to it in their novel The Lurker in the Threshold. , 1945):

"Ambrose Bierce, and here we get to something of a sinister nature (since Bierce was interested in extraterrestrial affairs), disappeared in Mexico. It was said that he had died fighting Villa, but at the time of his disappearance he must have been over seventy years old and he was practically an invalid. He was never heard from again. This occurred in one thousand nine hundred and thirteen."

Although many theories have been launched since then, the mystery remains.

Before leaving for Mexico, in a letter dated October 1, 1913, he wrote to one of his relatives in Washington: «Goodbye. If you hear that I have been placed against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please understand that I think that is a very good way to get out of this life. It beats old age, illness, or falling down the cellar stairs. Being a gringo in Mexico. Ah, that is euthanasia!

In the Encyclopedia Britannica the assumption is made that he could have died in the siege of Ojinaga (January 1914), since a document from the time records the death in this battle of "a gringo old". The generally accepted date of his death is 1914. Oral tradition from the town of Sierra Mojada (Coahuila), documented by priest Jaime Lienert, attests that Bierce was executed by firing squad in the town cemetery.

There is a version that Ambrose Bierce, who was very fond of paranormal phenomena, entered what is now known as The Zone of Silence, which is an area located in the central part of the Mapimí Bolsón, between the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila and Durango. El Bolsón de Mapimí is located in the north-central part of Mexico, about 180 km northwest of La Laguna, whose main cities are Torreón, Gómez Palacio and Lerdo. It is part of the Chihuahuan Desert.

The Zone of Silence is located between Durango, Chihuahua and Coahuila, between the 26th and 28th parallels. Its name comes from the urban myth that radio waves cannot be transmitted in the place in a normal way, a place where there are many meteorites, increased magnetism, presence of fauna and flora different from other places and the appearance of aliens.

Legacy and influence

At least three films have been made about the story The Owl Bridge Incident: a silent film from 1920; another, French, called La Rivière du Hibou, from 1962, and a third version in 2005. The second of them was used for an episode of the television series Twilight Zone (The Twilight Zone), and an adaptation of it was included in the series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

The novelist Carlos Fuentes wrote a novel about Bierce's last years titled Old Gringo, which was made into a film as Old Gringo, played by Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda, and directed by the Argentine Luis Puenzo.

As a character Ambrose Bierce appears in the film From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter protosequel to From Dusk Till Dawn where he is played by Michael Parks.

The writer Pedro Paunero in his work “Lord of the Masks”, pioneer in the Weird Western and Steampunk subgenre in Mexico, deals with the disappearance of the American journalist Ambrose Bierce, in which Terror and Science Fiction are combined in the framework of the Mexican Revolution.

The American novelist Oakley Hall wrote and published from 1998 to 2005 a series of five novels, whose protagonist is Ambrose Bierce, working as a journalist in different media and solving mysterious crimes. The titles of the five novels are: Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades (1998) Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings (2001) Ambrose Bierce and the One-Eyed Jacks (2003) Ambrose Bierce and the Trey of Pearls (2004) Ambrose Bierce and the Ace of Shoots (2005)

Works

Books

• The Fiend's Delight (1873)
• Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874)
• The Dance of Death (with Thomas A. Harcourt and William Rulofson as William Herman) (1877)
• The Buho Bridge incident (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, 1891)
• Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (Counts of civilians and soldiers(1891), whose title was later changed by that of In the midst of life (In the Midst of Life), with reminiscent of the first verse of the Divine Comedy. In these accounts, the protagonists are normal characters to whom, with their own involuntary collaboration, the destiny invariably drags a fatal fairy.
• Black Beetles in Amber (1892)
• The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter (1892)
• Can Such Things Be? (Can this happen?(1893), collection of tales of supernatural terror.
• Fantastic Fables (1899)
• The shadow on the dial, and other essays (1909)
• The Devil's Dictionary (Devil's Dictionary(1911)
• Collected Works (1909)
• Write It Right (1909)
• A Horseman in the Sky, A Watcher by the Dead, The Man and the Snake (1920)??
• A Vision of Doom: Poems by Ambrose Bierce (1980)

Stories