The Life Of Ambrose Bierce Essay Research — страница 2

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book appeared under the pseudonym Dod Grile, which Bierce used for some of his English-published essays, Bierce gained notoriety for his acid wit and became known as “Bitter Bierce.” A second collection of California columns appeared under the imprint of Chatto and Windus in 1873, appropriately entitled Nuggets and Dust, and he became so successful as to be honored at a banquet alongside Twain and their fellow Westerner, poet Joaquin Miller. The Empress Eug nie — wife of deposed emperor Napoleon III of France — had been exiled to England and wished to finance a magazine, the Lantern, to defend Prussia — and offend her arch-enemy Rochefort, who had published La Lanterne in France. Mortimer, acting as her agent, choose Bierce to “edit” the project, although he wrote

virtually every word of its only two issues. In it he established his later-famous “Prattle” column. Afterward, he compiled sketches from the Fun and Figaro for his third volume, Cobwebs From an Empty Skull, which Routledge and Sons published in 1874. Bierce’s wife had borne two sons in England — Day and Leigh — and had returned with them to America before him. He rejoined her and his new-born daughter Helen in San Francisco in September of 1874 and sold irregularly to the journals while again employed at the Mint. In 1877, Col. Frank Pixley founded a weekly, the Argonaut, and signed Bierce as associate editor. The first number — dated March 25, 1877 — saw the revival of the “Prattle” column. Again Bierce appeared in book form, in a collaboration with William H.

Rulofson and T. A. Harcourt entitled The Dance of Death, issued under the nom de plume (or, better, nom de guerre) of William Herman. It was a full-scale assault on the waltz and enjoyed such attention that an anonymous author (J. Milton Sloluck) wrote a rebuttal, The Dance of Life. Bierce’s collaboration was published in 1877 and sold 18,000 copies — something of a best seller in those days. To escape his family and his mother-in-law (who insisted on living with them), Bierce frequented the Bohemian Club, a newly founded excuse for wining and reveling as gentlemen, of which he was for a time the dues-keeping secretary. After quitting, he shut himself up in his study or took long walks alone — just as Poe had done in Richmond, Virginia and Lovecraft in Providence, Rhode

Island. Meanwhile, the Argonaut because the foremost weekly in all the West, but personal squabbles lead to a break with Pixley. From March 25, 1877 to July 6, 1879 when Bierce left the Argonaut, 87 weekly columns appeared under his name. Bierce spent the year 1880 gold mining and shotgun-riding in the Black Hill s of South Dakota for Wells Fargo & Co. but was back in San Francisco in December of that year. The weekly Wasp had changed hands and Bierce became editor-in-chief with the New Year’s Day issue of 1881. The “Prattle” lived again, and Bierce also initiated “The Wasp’s Book of Wisdom,” a new column of witty epigrams. His editorship ended on September 11, 1895 leaving behind 225 columns. In March 1887, William Randloph Hearst — new owner of the San

Francisco Examiner — offered Bierce a handsome salary and a position on his staff. Bierce accepted and was again writing the “Prattle” column; but he also wrote many stories and various sketches and essays. The long era of his employment by Hearst stretched over twenty-one years and the peak of Bierce’s writing skill and output. This era, however, also marked the tragic suicide of Bierce’s eldest son and Bierce’s indefinite separation from his wife. These griefs — and the later death of his other son, Bierce’s divorce and the death of his wife — combined to harden his outer shell and make him even more bitter than before. It was, perhaps, this bitterness that strengthened the poignancy of his pen — his scalpel — and blackened his satire and morbid fiction to

an extent perhaps no other author has achieved. It was during this depressive, uncertain age that Bierce coined his famous motto, “Nothing matters.” In 1891 his first collection of stories appeared — twenty-six horror stories entitled Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, published by Mr. E. L. G. Steele of San Francisco. Shortly after, Andrew Chatto of Chatto and Windus reprinted the collection in England as In the Midst of Life. In 1892, Adolphe Danziger (Adolph de Castro), W. C. Morrow (author of The Ape, The Idiot & Other People), Joaquin Miller, and Bierce formed the Western Authors Publishing Co. Originally intended to publish any number of volumes, it issued only one: Black Beetles in Amber, a selection of Bierce’s venom in rhyme. Of this work it may be said that