Ambrose Bierce (1842–c. 1914) fought through some of the worst battles of the American Civil War — Shiloh, Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, where he took a bullet to the head — and then spent four decades as the most feared journalist in San Francisco. "Bitter Bierce," they called him, and his Devil's Dictionary remains the sharpest book of cynicism in English.
His war stories are something else entirely: precise, hallucinatory, and decades ahead of their time in technique. No American wrote better about how time behaves at the moment of death. In 1913, in his seventies, he rode into revolutionary Mexico to see the war and was never heard from again — an ending he might have written himself.
