It’s the birthday of Ambrose Bierce (1842-possibly 1914, but nobody knows), known in his day as “the wickedest man in San Francisco” for his brutal attacks as a journalist but better known today for The Devil’s Dictionary and for his short stories of horror and the supernatural. Kurt Vonnegut has called Bierce’s Civil War story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” the greatest short story in American literature.

As far as I can tell, Bierce as an author of fiction is a lot like Poe, only less so.

Bierce was born in Meigs County, Ohio, and raised in Kosciusko County, Indiana, one of 13 children whose names all began with the letter A, so that’s fun. Bierce apprenticed with a paper in Warsaw, Indiana, but then fought for the Union in the War of the Rebellion and saw action in the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga. He was wounded in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain (1864) and ultimately given a merit promotion to the rank of brevet major, which is the military’s way of saying, “Here’s a shiny new title but no actual authority to go with it.”

Bierce ended up in San Francisco and began writing for magazines, becoming editor of The News Letter in 1868. He married Mary Ellen “Molly” Day and they moved to England, where he wrote for English magazines and published several books, but the dismal English weather proved too much for his asthma and by 1875 they returned to San Francisco. In 1887 he began writing for Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner and began those brutal attacks on politicians, clergymen, and anyone he saw as a fraud and ended up greatly admired but at the top of nobody’s dinner party list; he and Molly divorced in 1904. His fiction, collected in such books as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can Such Things Be? (1893), was also brutal, but in a more horrifying, twisted-ending kind of way.

In 1906 Bierce published The Devil’s Dictionary, a lexicon of biting and contemptuous definitions and a very good read, according to sources close to me. In 1913, Bierce got sick of American life and went to Mexico to join Pancho Villa’s army as an observer, like you do, and nobody knows what happened to him next. Theories abound. Britannica.com thinks he may have died in the Siege of Ojinaga in 1914; others think he masked his own suicide, entered a sanatorium, or was executed by firing squad in a cemetery. I personally am going with alien abduction simply because I don’t think that theory is taken yet.

Bierce’s writings, life, and mysterious disappearance have spawned many stories, films, and spin-offs. So very many. If you’re interested in a bio of Bierce, you might try Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company (1999) by Roy Morris.

Have a fine and quiet Monday, don’t disappear off the face of the earth, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.