Research on Bierce Part One

And so, a million years later, this post is written:

Chronological Order of Battles Bierce was involved in:

Philippi / Philippi Races West Virginia June 3, 1861

Shiloh / Pittsburg Landing Tennessee April 6-7, 1862 Corinth Mississippi April 29-June 10, 1862
Corinth Mississippi October 3-4, 1862

Stones River / Murfreesboro Tennessee Dec 31, 1862-Jan 2, 1863
Franklin Tennessee April 10, 1863
Chickamauga Georgia September 18-20, 1863

Kennesaw Mountain Georgia June 27, 1864
Franklin Tennessee November 30, 1864 Nashville Tennessee December 15-16, 1864

http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/13197/list-of-civil-war-battles?i=1123

Below is some of the research I have done at the State Library:

Supernatural Literature of the World An Encyclopedia Vol 1 A-F
Edited by S.T Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz
pg109-113

·         entirety of AB's work is guided entirely by the satirical principle

·         edited San Francisco News Letter (1868-1872)
- a "volume of 'crazy tales' witticisms and satirical miscellany) was from the newsletter

·         AB "portrays with unmatched realism and grim poignancy the transience and loneliness of the mining camps of the American West." about the Nightdoings at Deadmans's.

·         returned to San Francisco in 1876 after three years in England

·         "The Damned Thing appears to have influenced HP Lovecraft's The Colour out of Space."

·         On The Eyes of the Panther - "My story is not a 'wonder story' and does not, I think, ever pass the boundaries of probability - merely an instance of prenatal influence. The girl can see in the dark - which means gleaming eyes - and has a mania for looking into windows o' nights. Transformation into an animal is another matter." (letter to C.W. Doyle, [October 1897]; ms. , Bancroft Library, Univ. of California)

·         "After resigning from Cosmopolitan in 1909, Bierce did little writing, spending most of his time assembling his Collected Works (Neale, 1909-12; 12 Vols). He wrote a textbook ending for the life of a supernatural writer by disappearing in Mexico in late 1913. (Conjectures by Walter Neale, Joe Mickell and Roy Morris Jr. , that he did not in fact go to Mexico have been proven false.) Bierce probably died in early 1914, in one of the battles of the Mexican Civil War." - Mike Ashley (who wrote the whole entry on Bierce in this book).

·         "On the borderline of the supernatural are a series of tales that either deal with a 'future historian's ' account of the distant past (ie 19th and 20th Centuries) or that feature fantastic voyages to imaginary locales. The thrust of both groups of stories is political satire as Bierce writes pungently of the failings of the American political system, chief among them the very principle of democracy."

·         "There is also a curious group of tales in which haunted houses, bizarre disappearances or other seemingly supernatural events are soberly and repertorically narrated. The point of these stories, apparently is not to persuade the reader that the occult incidents actually occurred, but rather the reverse; sly hints in these tales suggest that Bierce is making fun of credulous readers who accept similar accounts by the Society for Psychical Research and other such tendentious sources."

·         His poetry is largely satirical.

·         "The satire that is at very heart of Bierce's work finds its most piquent expression in those non-supernatural tales, whether of 'soldiers' or 'civilians', that display human beings psychologically crushed by the weight of fear - whether it be the fear of death as embodied by a corpse or the fear of being thought a coward in battle."

·         "As the prominent American writer since Edgar Allen Poe."

·         perhaps a significant influence on HP Lovecraft, L.P. Hartely, John Lohier, Shirley K=Jackson and Roald Dahl.