Bierce's education was limited to a year of high school and a short period in a military school. His frist job was as a printer's apprentice for the Northern Indianan. Enlisting in the Union army in 1861, Bierce served as a topographical officer and took part in a number of battles including Chickamauga (1863), which would later form the basis of his story of the same name (1889). Bierce was also wounded at the battle of Kenesaw Mountain. After the war, he moved to San Francisco and took a job as a watchman while he plied his career in journalism. He became the editor of the News Letter in 1868 and also contributed to the Overland Monthly and the Californian. Bierce's first publication was The Haunted Valley (1871), which appeared in the Overland Monthly. He married in 1872 and went to England where he lived in London until 1875, contributing to Figaro and Fun magazines and publishing three volumes of stories entitled The Friend's Delight (1872), Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California (1872) and Cobwebs From an Empty Skull (1874). Returning to the USA, Bierce became the associate editor of the San Francisco Argonaut, and after a stint at mining in the Dakotas and work at the San Francisco Wasp, he settled into a job with the Hearst newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, where he wrote a column for twenty years. A fantastic wit and sometimes cruel critic, Bierce collected the best of his epigrams in the Cynic's Word Book (1906), subsequently renamed to the Devil's Dictionary in 1911. Bierce also wrote for the New York Journal and Cosmopolitan Magazine. He retired from writing in 1913 and is said to have moved to Mexico, where he mysteriously disappeared during the civil war there in 1914. |
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