Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, and grew up in Indiana. He served as an officer in the Union Army through the Civil War, an experience that shaped his best-known short stories, and afterwards made his career in journalism, chiefly in San Francisco, where his newspaper column made him feared as a satirist. His prose includes the story collection In the Midst of Life (1892) and the dictionary of cynical definitions later published as The Devil's Dictionary.

His verse was mostly satire. Black Beetles in Amber (1892) gathers epigrams, mock-epitaphs and lampoons aimed at the politicians, editors, clergymen and businessmen of the Pacific Coast; Shapes of Clay (1903) collects later satires, fables and a few serious poems. In the autumn of 1913 he left for Mexico, then in revolution, and was last heard from in a letter of December 1913; his fate and the date of his death are unknown.