The achievement of Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce as a humorist is underrated, largely because attention has focused on his grim tales of war and the macabre. To consider the great majority of works in his canon, however, is to see them as products of one of America's most versatile and prolific satirists. Adeptly maneuvering in such brief forms as the editorial, essay, tale, fable, epigram, and lyric, Bierce conducted a savagely unrelenting, but always witty, assault on human folly of all kinds. Reminding us of Swift and La Rochefoucauld before him, and sometimes of Twain and Harte among his contemporaries, Bierce points to the twentieth century and the work of Mencken, Benchley, Thurber, and the "black humorists." Above all, though, Bierce was neither an unimaginative imitator nor one whose sardonic outlook could be easily duplicated.

He was born in the backwoods settlement of Horse Cave Creek, Meigs County, Ohio...