Ambrose Bierce: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources

Ambrose Bierce is well known to readers as the author of The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) and numerous short stories, such as the Civil War tales gathered in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and the horror stories collected in Can Such Things Be? (1893). But, in his own day, he was best known as a prolific and fearless jounalist, and in the 40 years of his literary career he wrote thousands of articles for newspapers and magazines in San Francisco, London, and elsewhere. Most of the articles and poems that Bierce published in his own 12-volume Collected Works (1909-12) first appeared in his newspaper columns, as did his celebrated tales. With the growing scholarly interest in Bierce, these contributions are eliciting more attention.

This bibliography is the first to attempt an exhaustive catalog of Bierce’s entire body of published work. While the volume includes a chapter of separate publications by Bierce, such as individual books, its most important feature is a chapter listing entries for his contributions to books and periodicals. These entries identify the first appearances of his stories, articles, and poems. An additional chapter lists reprints of his works, and the volume also provides information about manuscript holdings. Joshi and Schultz demonstrate that in addition to being a master short story writer, fabulist, and epigrammatist, Bierce may also have been the leading American journalist of the 19th century.