A Son of the Gods, and A Horseman in the Sky

Ambrose Bierce

Nov 2012 · The Floating Press

About this ebook

Today, Ambrose Bierce is best remembered for his blazingly satirical take on politics and society in general, which was probably best encapsulated in The Devil's Dictionary. However, Bierce paid his literary dues as a war reporter, and battlefield conflicts were a frequent topic of his fiction. A Son of the Gods, and A Horseman in the Sky brings together a pair of exquisitely observed short tales of the American Civil War.

About the author

Ambrose Bierce was a brilliant, bitter, and cynical journalist. He is also the author of several collections of ironic epigrams and at least one powerful story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Bierce was born in Ohio, where he had an unhappy childhood. He served in the Union army during the Civil War. Following the war, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a columnist for the newspaper the Examiner, for which he wrote a number of satirical sketches. Bierce wrote a number of horror stories, some poetry, and countless essays. He is best known, however, for The Cynic's Word Book (1906), retitled The Devil's Dictionary in 1911, a collection of such cynical definitions as "Marriage: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two." Bierce's own marriage ended in divorce, and his life ended mysteriously. In 1913, he went to Mexico and vanished, presumably killed in the Mexican revolution.