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    7 best short stories by Ambrose Bierce
    7 best short stories by Ambrose Bierce
    7 best short stories by Ambrose Bierce
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    7 best short stories by Ambrose Bierce

    By Ambrose Bierce and August Nemo

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    Ambrose Bierce was born on June 24, 1842 in Meigs county, Ohio. He worked as a printer's apprentice and enlisted to fight in the Civil War. After the war he worked as an editor, journalist, and short story writer; capturing his war experiences in vivid detail. Although his caustic and satirical style granted him notoriety as a journalist, nowadays he is remembered for his incursions into the genre of terror, influencing authors of the stature of H.P. Lovecraft, and is considered one of the most significant of the nineteenth century, together with others such as Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant. Profoundly misanthropic, expressed in his writings his distrust of the human race, distrust expressed with a critical attitude that earned him the nickname of Bitter Bierce .This selection specially chosen by the literary critic August Nemo, contains the following stories:An Occurrence at Owl Creek BridgeOne Summer NightThe Death Of Halpin FrayserThe Moonlit RoadA Psychological ShipwreckThe StrangerThe Middle Toe of the Right Foot
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTacet Books
    Release dateMay 14, 2020
    ISBN9783968580791
    7 best short stories by Ambrose Bierce
    Author

    Ambrose Bierce

    Ambrose Bierce was an American writer, critic and war veteran. Bierce fought for the Union Army during the American Civil War, eventually rising to the rank of brevet major before resigning from the Army following an 1866 expedition across the Great Plains. Bierce’s harrowing experiences during the Civil War, particularly those at the Battle of Shiloh, shaped a writing career that included editorials, novels, short stories and poetry. Among his most famous works are “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “The Boarded Window,” “Chickamauga,” and What I Saw of Shiloh. While on a tour of Civil-War battlefields in 1913, Bierce is believed to have joined Pancho Villa’s army before disappearing in the chaos of the Mexican Revolution.

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      7 best short stories by Ambrose Bierce - Ambrose Bierce

      Publisher

      The Author

      Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born in Ohio on June 24, 1842 and grew up in Kosciusko, Indiana. He was the tenth of thirteen children, and served in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861-1865). He settled in San Francisco, but eventually moved to London where he worked as a columnist and contributor to various publications. However he ended up returning to San Francisco to collaborate in several newspapers of the empire Hearst, becoming a controversial character with its corrosive articles and columns. He married in 1871 with Mary Ellen Day, with whom he had three children and from which he divorced in 1904.

      Although his caustic and satirical style granted him notoriety as a journalist, nowadays he is remembered for his incursions into the genre of terror, influencing authors of the stature of H.P. Lovecraft, and is considered one of the most significant of the nineteenth century, together with others such as Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant. Profoundly misanthropic, expressed in his writings his distrust of the human race, distrust expressed with a critical attitude that earned him the nickname of Bitter Bierce .

      In 1913, aged 71, he traveled to Mexico with the intention of revisiting the areas where he had fought in the Civil War, and of observer in the Mexican Revolution, and his trail was lost in Juarez, so today the date of his death is unknown.

      An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

      I

      A MAN STOOD UPON A railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners—two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as support, that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest—a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it. Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground—a gentle acclivity topped with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge. Midway of the slope between the bridge and fort were the spectators—a single company of infantry in line, at parade rest, the butts of the rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon his right. Excepting the group of four at the center of the bridge, not a man moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless. The sentinels, facing the banks of the stream, might have been statues to adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded arms, silent, observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.

      The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good—a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.

      The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped aside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing. The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himself immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties of the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but not quite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by the weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a signal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man go down between two ties. The arrangement commended itself to his judgment as simple and effective. His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his unsteadfast footing, then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of

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