Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce (1842–c. 1914) was an American journalist and writer, born in a log cabin in Ohio, who fought through the Civil War in the Union army, was wounded in the head at Kennesaw Mountain and carried the war's horrors into his fiction. In San Francisco he became the most feared columnist on the West Coast and compiled the definitions later collected as The Devil's Dictionary. His stories, gathered in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891), later retitled In the Midst of Life, include "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." In 1913, aged seventy-one, he crossed into Mexico to observe Pancho Villa's revolution and was never heard from again.