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Summary
Summary
Alone among important American writers, Ambrose Bierce fought for four years in the Civil War. The writings he produced about that conflict comprise a body of work unique in our nation's literature. This volume gathers for the first time virtually everything Bierce wrote about the war, from letters composed on the field of battle to maps he drew as a topographical engineer, from his masterful short stories to his final bittersweet ruminations before he disappeared into Mexico in 1914.
The collection is organized chronologically, following Bierce's participation in a wide range of battles, from the early skirmishes in the West Virginia mountains to the bloodbaths at Shiloh and Chickamauga and his near fatal wounding at Kennesaw Mountain. His overlapping accounts of these events provide a clear and compelling record of the sights and sounds of the battlefield, the psychological traumas the war induced in its soldiers, and the memories that would haunt survivors for the rest of their lives. In prose that anticipates the work of Ernest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien, Bierce's writings unflinchingly tell the truth about the war.
Writing in the 1880s and 1890s, at a time when both the North and South were erecting monuments to the heroes and glories of the war, Bierce insisted that his readers confront what really happened. Rather than celebrate causes and comrades, Bierce's fiction and memoirs describe the impossibly brutal realities of the Civil War battlefield.
The volume includes a biographical introduction and comprehensive notes on all the writings and is suitable for classroom adoption and general readers alike.
Author Notes
Ambrose Bierce was a brilliant, bitter, and cynical journalist. He is also the author of several collections of ironic epigrams and at least one powerful story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."
Bierce was born in Ohio, where he had an unhappy childhood. He served in the Union army during the Civil War. Following the war, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a columnist for the newspaper the Examiner, for which he wrote a number of satirical sketches.
Bierce wrote a number of horror stories, some poetry, and countless essays. He is best known, however, for The Cynic's Word Book (1906), retitled The Devil's Dictionary in 1911, a collection of such cynical definitions as "Marriage: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two." Bierce's own marriage ended in divorce, and his life ended mysteriously. In 1913, he went to Mexico and vanished, presumably killed in the Mexican revolution.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Choice Review
Bierce enlisted days after the first shots were fired at Ft. Sumter and served through 1865, seeing much bitter action, engaging in heroic acts, and almost dying from a severe head wound. For the rest of his life, Bierce wrote about the Civil War. The editors collected all of Bierce's Civil War writings and organized them chronologically. Each chapter begins with an introductory essay that puts Bierce's work during that year in context and with excerpts from The Devil's Dictionary (1906). Then comes Bierce's writing--poetry, fiction, prose, journalistic pieces, letters--fully footnoted so the reader comes away with in-depth understanding of the numerous references Bierce interlarded in his writing. By including all of Bierce's war writings, the editors allow the reader to see how a leading US writer thought and wrote about war over a 40-year period. The glossary of military terms and the section on basic military organization will help readers with Bierce's detailed references to military matters. A valuable addition to the growing body of work on Bierce as a war writer, this anthology joins Michael Schaefer's Just What War Is: The Civil War Writings of De Forest and Bierce (CH, Jun'98). Highly recommended for the material itself and for the editors' critical insights. All levels. B. Adler Valdosta State University
Library Journal Review
In calling Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman our poets of the American Civil War, we unfairly neglect the Ohio-born Bierce, who, unlike the first two authors, actually fought for the Union army, at Chicamauga, Missionary Ridge, Bloody Shiloh, and elsewhere. If the average reader is at all aware of Bierce, it is probably from a few choice definitions from The Devil's Dictionary, the phantasmagoric story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and the author's mysterious disappearance in Mexico in 1913. However, Bierce, whose nastiness toward contemporary writers and critics came home to roost when his own reputation had to be decided, deserves to be better known. His war experience gives the 27 brief war stories in Shadows of Blue & Gray the ring of authenticity. In a sometimes turgid writing style (slaves are once described, for example, as "sons and daughters of Ham"), Bierce depicts a war that is at once horrifying, pointless, and supernatural the stuff of The Twilight Zone. The nine pieces in "Memoirs and Chronicles" and "Reminiscence and Memoria," with which editor Thomsen fittingly rounds out this volume, are as artful as the fictions. Recommended for all libraries. Despite the strengths of Thomsen's collection, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period is a superior work, for it includes not only all of Bierce's short fiction and nonfiction about the Civil War but a detailed 25-page introduction that is invaluable in placing Bierce in historical context and thus helping to explain his stance as a realist about the war and a satirist about post-Civil War American self-congratulation and heroic myth-making. Duncan (American history, Univ. of Copenhagen) and Klooster (English, Hope Coll.) wisely organize Bierce's myriad stories, memoirs, letters, newspaper columns, and even war poems around the war's five-year duration. Instead of a curmudgeon who happened to write war stories, this volume portrays a man who joined the Union army at age 20, fought in the bloodiest battles until a Confederate bullet in the head took him out of combat, and revisited the battlefields and retrieved the experience in memory until his disappearance. Highly recommended for all libraries. Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
