検索キーワード： "Ambrose Bierce" 歴史

Horror and the supernatural are the background of Bierce's short stories. His style is marked by vivid description, grim situations, and sardonic twists of fate. In terms of technique, he was far ahead of his time and his short stories are among the very best in American literature.

This is a simple story of a battle; such a tale as may be told by a soldier who is no writer to a reader who is no soldier. Ambrose Bierce wrote many fictional short stories about the Civil War. This is his experience at Shiloh.  

Ambrose Bierce brings to life the heart rendering stories of divided loyalties, splitting families, states, countries, and individuals. He writes of the glory in beginning and savagery in the doing. Here is a moving anti-war series of stories if ever there was one. A must read by all students of American History and Literature, though perhaps best understood by older adults.

 Between 1862 and 1865 Ambrose Bierce served in the Union Army in the Civil War. He was active as an infantryman and engineer, and fought at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. Six autobiographical pieces were inspired by his wartime experiences and were published as a collection in 1909.

Ambrose Bierce, a veteran of the Civil War and writer of note, had a fascination with death and PTSD as a result of his war experience. "One of the Missing" follows Private Jerome Searing, an Army scout, as he goes behind enemy lines. In today's military, Searing would probably be in the Navy Seals or Army Special Forces. He was good at his job, and his job was soldiering.

As a satirist, Bierce was famously dubbed the “Mark Twain of the North.” Any figure of public note in San Francisco came to know him as “Bitter Bierce,” or by his initials, which in public life were often translated as “Almighty God Bierce.” Ambrose Bierce wrote the most interesting story of all by disappearing from the world in a final late-life Mexican adventure, amidst that country’s revolution. A new theory of his demise emerges with each passing year.

In this missive Ambrose Bierce recounts two days in his life, April 6 and April 7, 1862, perhaps the two most significant days of his life. He and over 100,000 other combatants have gathered about a small church near the town of Corinth, "a wretched place--the capital of a swamp, two days' march west of the Tennessee River". The church is Shiloh, and it will lend its name to the great battle that took place there.

In "Iconoclastic Memories of the Civil War: Bits of Autobiography," Bierce recounts some of his experiences as a soldier. At the outset of the American Civil War, Bierce enlisted in the Union Army's 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. In February 1862 he was commissioned First Lieutenant, and served on the staff of General William Babcock Hazen as a topographical engineer, making maps of likely battlefields.