Ambrose Bierce: Brilliant Cynic

An article in the October 2011 issue of the Atlantic notes that the Library of America is finally issuing a collection of Ambrose Bierce's best-known writings. Unfortunately, this brilliant 19th-century writer and thinker is not much remembered nowadays. The author of the Atlantic article, Benjamin Schwarz, speculates that this is because "although Bierce wrote exemplary American prose, his unrelieved pessimism rubs deeply against the American grain." Bierce was part of an abolitionist family, fought bravely in the Civil War, was nearly killed, and emerged from the war believing that war was "nothing more than a meaningless and murderous slaughter" (Schwarz). But (Schwarz again) "his ordeal gave birth to a lonely, stoic, and bitter rectitude, a sensibility that was the impetus of his career as a writer and of his compressed, astringent prose style." Bierce is best known for his "Devil's Dictionary," which Schwarz labels "a Swiftian tour de force" and "among the most eccentric books in American literature." His work is so fierce, so smart, and so uncompromising that it both makes one laugh (he is very cutting and very funny, although in a bitter way) and makes one feel that the state of America and the world is intolerable. Still, I think we need writers like Bierce, and wish we had a Bierce alive now to comment on what is going on in the United States and the world today.