The American writer Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1842-ca. 1914) expressed the cynicism of the post-Civil War era and shaped both the materials and the methods of writers who later voiced the disillusionment following World War I.

Ambrose Bierce was born in Meigs County, Ohio, and reared in Kosciusko County, Ind. He was a printer's apprentice before enlisting and serving with distinction in the Civil War. He launched a journalistic career in California and continued it in London from 1872 to 1876. There he served on the staffs of the magazines Fun and the Lantern, contributed to Hood's Comic Almanac, and under the pseudonym Dod Grile published the books Fiend's Delight (1872), Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California (1872), and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874). Back in California he became an outstanding contributor to William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner. In 1897 he went to Washington, D.C., as a correspondent for the Hearst papers...