Bitter Bierce, the caustic columnist. Thus was Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce best known, and thus is he best remembered. Yet in his lifetime he embraced several careers: soldier, expatriate literatur, gold prospector, and newspaper writer. It is the latter career which established his reputation, but his short stories--many of them inspired by his military experience--have been anthologized frequently. His success as a literary artist could not have been predicted from his origins as a farmboy in the Appalachian foothills of southern Ohio.

Ambrose Bierce was born 24 June 1842 on a farm in Meigs County, Ohio, near the border of what was to become West Virginia. He was the tenth of thirteen children born to Marcus Aurelius and Laura Sherwood Bierce, and he was the youngest of those who survived infancy. In 1846 the Bierces moved to northern Indiana, near Warsaw. There Ambrose went to school, and, at the age of fifteen...