UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce

Book Jacket: Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period" edited by R. Duncan and D. J. Klooster

Edited by Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster

Gathers for the first time in one volume all of Bierce’s war writings

Alone among important American writers, Ambrose Bierce fought for four years in the Civil War. The writings he produced about that conflict comprise a body of work unique in our nation's literature. This volume gathers for the first time virtually everything Bierce wrote about the war, from letters composed on the field of battle to maps he drew as a topographical engineer, from his masterful short stories to his final bittersweet ruminations before he disappeared into Mexico in 1914.

The collection is organized chronologically, following Bierce's participation in a wide range of battles, from the early skirmishes in the West Virginia mountains to the bloodbaths at Shiloh and Chickamauga and his near fatal wounding at Kennesaw Mountain. His overlapping accounts of these events provide a clear and compelling record of the sights and sounds of the battlefield, the psychological traumas the war induced in its soldiers, and the memories that would haunt survivors for the rest of their lives. In prose that anticipates the work of Ernest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien, Bierce's writings unflinchingly tell the truth about the war.

Writing in the 1880s and 1890s, at a time when both the North and South were erecting monuments to the heroes and glories of the war, Bierce insisted that his readers confront what really happened. Rather than celebrate causes and comrades, Bierce's fiction and memoirs describe the impossibly brutal realities of the Civil War battlefield. The volume includes a biographical introduction and comprehensive notes on all the writings and is suitable for classroom adoption and general readers alike.

"An hour with this superbly edited volume will cure any Civil War buff...Here is exemplary American prose, and here is the real war—without uplift, without virtue, without purpose."

Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic Monthly
"It includes not only all of Bierce's short fiction and nonfiction about the Civil War but a detailed 25 page introduction that is invaluable in placing Bierce in historical context and thus helping to explain his status as a realist about the war and a satirist about post-Civil War American self-congratulation and heroic myth making. Highly recommended."

Library Journal
"It is excellent to have all of Bierce's writings on the Civil War accessible in a single, eminently teachable volume. Bierce writes with great strength and never hides from us the ugliness of war. This book will stand beside such equally powerful works as All Quiet on the Western Front and The Things They Carried in the canon on modern war."

William S. McFeely
"The main argument, that Bierce's Civil War writings are undeservedly unknown to all but a small group of specialists, is powerfully borne out by this excellent collection of his work and by the editors' own fine work in placing these pieces in their historical, cultural, and literary contexts. This book makes a highly significant contribution to American literary studies."

Michael W. Schaefer, author of Just What War Is:
The Civil War Writings of De Forest and Bierce

Russell Duncan is associate professor of American history at the University of Copenhagen.

David J. Klooster is associate professor of English at Hope College.

Literary Studies / American Studies / Civil War History
368 pp., 6 illus.
$60.00s library cloth edition, ISBN 1-55849-327-1
$24.95t paper, ISBN 1-55849-328-X
May 2002
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