They called him “Almighty God Bierce.” While he lived, America writhed under his Jovian glance and the ceaseless probings of his malicious pen. In death, the strangeness of his life and art persisted as a powerful influence on the American imagination. Even today, Ambrose Bierce stands second only to Poe as a master of the macabre, second to none in the savageness of his words and wit. The Civil War was the making of Bierce, and it was during this violent half-decade that the handsome, ambitious farmboy came of age both emotionally and intellectually. As the war tested Bierce’s courage and fortitude under fire, as it removed the last of his romantic notions about the meaning of existence, so did it awaken in him a kind of passionate contempt for human weakness and venality and a vastly expanded understanding of his own potentialities.
“Almighty God Bierce” was the chief bane and adornment of the San Francisco literary and journalistic scene from 1876 to his departure for Washington in 1896. Like H. L. Mencken, whom he influenced so deeply, Bierce respected no man, no God, no thing, and his column “Prattle” in the San Francisco Examiner has been called “the source of the most scorching wit, irony, satire, and bludgeoning ever printed by an American newspaper.” When Bierce assayed the Washington scene, the entire capital fled for cover.
Bierce’s years in Washington saw him at the high tide of his fame, but they did not make up for the total disaster which was his personal life. A terrible father and long since absent husband, Bierce bore a heavy responsibility for his eldest son’s suicide at sixteen and for his younger son’s death of acute alcoholism at thirty. Only Bierce’s daughter Helen stayed by him to the end.
In 1912, after three years of fitful retirement from the literary scene, Bierce journeyed to Mexico with no apparent object in view. The last word ever heard from Bierce came in the much quoted letter he posted from Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1913: “If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it’s a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia.’’
As Richard O’Connor demonstrates in this, the first full study of Ambrose Bierce since 1929, Bierce deserves far greater recognition than contemporary literary scholars have given him. His influence on such writers as Stephen Crane, Mencken, and Sinclair Lewis was deep and lasting. His Civil War stories are the work of the only important writer who actually fought in the war. His brutal wit and perverse sense of humor make him the legitimate progenitor of the Black Humorists of today.
Ambrose Bierce could not be more compellingly readable. To read about this widely talented and embittered man is to understand with increased vividness the dark side of the American mind — a side that has gotten no lighter or less disturbing with the passage of years.
Richard O’Connor began writing at the age of seventeen as a newspaper reporter, and since then has written many fiction and nonfiction books. His most recent include biographies of Jack London and Bret Harte.
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