Poems of Ambrose Bierce

Grenander, M. E., Editor

ISBN 10: 0803212461 / ISBN 13: 9780803212466

Published by University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1995

About this Item

First University of Nebraska Press edition - first printing. Book is clean and tight. Dust jacket in protective cover. 202 pages with index.

Seller Inventory # 000499

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Poems of Ambrose Bierce
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803212461
• ISBN 13: 9780803212466
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Thus
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

Ambrose Bierce is one of the most colorful figures in American literary history. A writer whose Devil's Dictionary remains the delight of misanthropes and fans of satire throughout the English-speaking world, he was also a master of the short story form. From the late 1860s through the early 1900s, he worked as a journalist, gaining wide renown in the 1890s and 1900s as a satirical columnist for William Randolph Hearst’s chain of newspapers. In 1913 Bierce traveled to Mexico and joined Pancho Villa’s army as an observer. He disappeared late that year and his fate has been a matter of dispute ever since.

The poems that Bierce wrote throughout his career are less well known than his stories, journalistic pieces, and aphoristic observations on human folly. Nevertheless, his work as a poet, as critic Donald Sidney-Fryer has argued, "clearly merits the attention of the discriminating lover and student of poetry." Varied in form and subject matter, most of his poems are (not surprisingly) satires.

This volume contains a generous selection of Bierce’s poems; they are alternately ironic, melancholy, bitter, and wickedly amusing. There are also fifteen essays and letters on poetry, poets, and such topics as "Wit and Humor" and "The Passing of Satire." Certainly there have been few authors more intimately familiar with wit and satire than the brilliant, iconoclastic Bierce. As editor M. E. Grenander makes plain in her introduction, both are abundantly present in this collection of "some of the most remarkable verse in American literary history."

About the Author

M. E. Grenander is a Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Internationally recognized as a leading Bierce scholar, she is the author of Ambrose Bierce. Her articles on Bierce have appeared in the Western Humanities Review, American Literary Realism, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and other publications.