Ambrose Bierce's Civilians and Soldiers in Context


Book Description

Donald T. Blume rejects the view that In the Midst of Life, the second volume of Bierce's collected works, is his most important literary work. Instead, he posits that Bierce's original 1892 collection is his most definitive and authoritative opus.




Chickamauga


Book Description

»Chickamauga« is a short story by Ambrose Bierce, originally published in 1889. AMBROSE BIERCE [1842-1914] was an American author, journalist, and war veteran. He was one of the most influential journalists in the United States in the late 19th century and alongside his success as a horror writer he was hailed as a pioneer of realism. Among his most famous works are The Devil's Dictionary and the short story »An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.«




Tales of Soldiers and Civilians


Book Description

This revised edition of Ambrose Bierce's 1892 collection of "Soldiers" and "Civilians" tales fills a void in American literature. A veteran of the Civil War and a journalist known for his integrity and biting satire, Ambrose Bierce was also a lively short-story writer of considerable depth and power. As San Francisco's most famous journalist during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Bierce was hired by William Randolph Hearst to write a column for San Francisco Examiner, where his "Soldiers" and "Civilians" tales first appeared during the late 1880s. By the standards of his day and ours, Bierce's journalism was often brilliantly insightful, viciously libelous, petty, and grand, frequently in the space of a single paragraph. This edition reveals the often compelling artistry of Bierce's original versions of the tales and the intentionally intricate design and scope of the original collection.




An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge


Book Description

Classic Books Library presents this brand new edition of the short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) by Ambrose Bierce. In this text Bierce creatively uses both structure and content to explore the concept of time, from present to past, and reflecting its transitional and illusive qualities. The story is one of Bierce’s most popular and acclaimed works, alongside “The Devil’s Dictionary” (1911). Bierce (1842-c. 1914) was an American writer, journalist and Civil War veteran associated with the realism literary movement. His writing is noted for its cynical, brooding tones and structural precision.




A Study Guide for Ambrose Bierce's A Horseman in the Sky


Book Description

A Study Guide for Ambrose Bierce's "A Horseman in the Sky," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.




A Holy Terror


Book Description

Buried treasure. An abandoned cemetery. An inexperienced gravedigger. What could go wrong? When Jefferson Doman learns of a generous treasure left by an old friend, he locates the supposed burial site - the grave of a mysterious woman named Scarry. As he begins to dig, he uncovers much more than just treasure. Ambrose Bierce’s ‘A Holy Terror’ follows the misadventures of Jefferson Doman and the bizarre, disturbing, and inexplicable things that he encounters along the way. Sparing descriptions, a fast pace, and an irresistible mystery make this story unmissable for fans of Jack London, Mark Twain, and H.P Lovecraft. Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) was an American author and journalist. Affectionately known as ‘Bitter Bierce’, his horror and fiction stories are famed for their cynicism, obscurity, and sardonic view of human nature. Some of his most notable works include ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge', ‘Tales of Soldiers and Civilians’ and ‘The Moonlit Road’.




Civil War Stories


Book Description

Sixteen dark and vivid tales by great satirist: "A Horseman in the Sky," "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "Chicakamauga," "A Son of the Gods," "What I Saw of Shiloh," more. Note.




Gateway to the Confederacy


Book Description

A collection of ten new essays from some of our finest Civil War historians working today, Gateway to the Confederacy offers a reexamination of the campaigns fought to gain possession of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Each essay addresses how Americans have misconstrued the legacy of these struggles and why scholars feel it necessary to reconsider one of the most critical turning points of the American Civil War. The first academic analysis that delineates all three Civil War campaigns fought from 1862 to 1863 for control of Chattanooga -- the trans-portation hub of the Confederacy and gateway to the Deep South -- this book deals not only with military operations but also with the campaigns' origins and consequences. The essays also explore the far-reaching social and political implications of the battles and bring into sharp focus their impact on postwar literature and commemoration. Several chapters revise the traditional portraits of both famous and con-troversial figures including Ambrose Bierce and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Others investigate some of the more salient moments of these cam-paigns such as the circumstances that allowed for the Confederate breakthrough assault at Chickamauga. Gateway to the Confederacy reassesses these pivotal battles, long in need of reappraisal, and breaks new ground as each scholar re-shapes a particular aspect of this momentous part of the Civil War. CONTRIBUTORS Russell S. Bonds Stephen Cushman Caroline E. Janney Evan C. Jones David A. Powell Gerald J. Prokopowicz William Glenn Robertson Wiley Sword Craig L. Symonds




Belligerent Muse


Book Description

War destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates. It is, in this way, a muse, and a powerful one at that. The American Civil War was a particularly prolific muse--unleashing with its violent realities a torrent of language, from soldiers' intimate letters and diaries to everyday newspaper accounts, great speeches, and enduring literary works. In Belligerent Muse, Stephen Cushman considers the Civil War writings of five of the most significant and best known narrators of the conflict: Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Considering their writings both as literary expressions and as efforts to record the rigors of the war, Cushman analyzes their narratives and the aesthetics underlying them to offer a richer understanding of how Civil War writing chronicled the events of the conflict as they unfolded and then served to frame the memory of the war afterward. Elegantly interweaving military and literary history, Cushman uses some of the war's most famous writers and their works to explore the profound ways in which our nation's great conflict not only changed the lives of its combatants and chroniclers but also fundamentally transformed American letters.




The Good Men Who Won the War


Book Description

Examines how Union veterans of the Army of the Cumberland employed the extinction of slavery in the trans-Appalachian South in their memory of the Civil War Robert Hunt examines how Union veterans of the Army of the Cumberland employed the extinction of slavery in the trans-Appalachian South in their memory of the Civil War. Hunt argues that rather than ignoring or belittling emancipation, it became central to veterans’ retrospective understanding of what the war, and their service in it, was all about. The Army of the Cumberland is particularly useful as a subject for this examination because it invaded the South deeply, encountering numerous ex-slaves as fugitives, refugees, laborers on military projects, and new recruits. At the same time, the Cumberlanders were mostly Illinoisans, Ohioans, Indianans, and, significantly, Kentucky Unionists, all from areas suspicious of abolition before the war. Hunt argues that the collapse of slavery in the trans-Appalachian theater of the Civil War can be usefully understood by exploring the post-war memories of this group of Union veterans. He contends that rather than remembering the war as a crusade against the evils of slavery, the veterans of the Army of the Cumberland saw the end of slavery as a by-product of the necessary defeat of the planter aristocracy that had sundered the Union; a good and necessary outcome, but not necessarily an assertion of equality between the races. Some of the most provocative discussions about the Civil War in current scholarship are concerned with how memory of the war was used by both the North and the South in Reconstruction, redeemer politics, the imposition of segregation, and the Spanish-American War. This work demonstrates that both the collapse of slavery and the economic and social post-War experience convinced these veterans that they had participated in the construction of the United States as a world power, built on the victory won against corrupt Southern plutocrats who had impeded the rightful development of the country.