SOURCE: Blume, Donald T. “‘A Quarter of an Hour’: Hanging as Ambrose Bierce and Peyton Farquhar Knew It.” American Literary Realism 34, no. 2 (winter 2002): 146-57.

In the following essay, Blume explores Bierce's knowledge of executions and the physiological effects of hanging and argues that the hallucination sequence in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” takes place in a fifteen-minute period after his neck was broken.

When “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” first appeared in William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner on 13 July 1890, it became the eleventh Civil War story Ambrose Bierce, the locally famous author of “Prattle,” a long-running and widely read weekly column, had published within the paper following his hiring by Hearst early in 1887. Bierce's subsequent republications of the story in three collections divided into “Soldiers” and “Civilians” sections further established the tale's identity as a war story with a “twist” ending.¹ As generations of readers...