[10] S. T. Joshi speculates that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever produced, and in this regard can take his place with such figures as Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire.

[11] His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others,[12] and he was considered an influential and feared literary critic.

[18] He was the tenth of thirteen children, all of whom were given names by their father beginning with the letter "A": in order of birth, the Bierce siblings were Abigail, Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert, Ambrose, Arthur, Adelia, and Aurelia.

[22][23] In April 1863 he was commissioned a first lieutenant, and served on the staff of General William Babcock Hazen as a topographical engineer, making maps of likely battlefields.

[24] As a staff officer, Bierce became known to leading generals such as George H. Thomas and Oliver O. Howard, both of whom supported his application for admission to West Point in May 1864.

[25] In June 1864, Bierce sustained a traumatic brain injury at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and spent the rest of the summer on furlough, returning to active duty in September.

The expedition traveled by horseback and wagon from Omaha, Nebraska, arriving toward year's end in San Francisco, California.

His first book, The Fiend's Delight, a compilation of his articles, was published in London in 1873 by John Camden Hotten under the pseudonym "Dod Grile".

He also became one of the first regular columnists and editorialists on William Randolph Hearst's newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner,[2] eventually becoming one of the most prominent and influential writers and journalists[citation needed] on the West Coast.

Central Pacific executive Collis P. Huntington persuaded a friendly member of Congress to introduce a bill excusing the companies from repaying the loans, amounting to $130 million (worth $4.76 billion today).

Despite a national uproar that ended his ambitions for the presidency (and even his membership in the Bohemian Club), Hearst kept employing Bierce.

[37][38] Bierce wrote realistically of the terrible things he had seen in the war[39] in such stories as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", "A Horseman in the Sky", "One of the Missing", and "Chickamauga".

His grimly realistic cycle of 25 war stories has been called "the greatest anti-war document in American literature".

[37] In his later stories, apparently under the influence of Maupassant, Bierce "dedicated himself to shocking the audience", as if his purpose was "to attack the reader's smug intellectual security".

[43] Bierce's bias towards Naturalism has also been noted:[44] "The biting, deriding quality of his satire, unbalanced by any compassion for his targets, was often taken as petty meanness, showing contempt for humanity and an intolerance to the point of merciless cruelty".

[46] In his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature", H. P. Lovecraft characterized Bierce's fictional work as "grim and savage."

Day committed suicide after a romantic rejection (he non-fatally shot the woman of his affections along with her fiancé beforehand),[50][51] and Leigh died of pneumonia related to alcoholism.

[52] He had lifelong asthma,[53] as well as complications from his war wounds, most notably episodes of fainting and irritability assignable to the traumatic brain injury experienced at Kennesaw Mountain.

In Ciudad Juárez he joined Pancho Villa's army as an observer, and in that role he witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca.

[55][56][57] After closing this letter by saying, "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination," he vanished without a trace, one of the most famous disappearances in American literary history.

"[58] Skeptic Joe Nickell noted that the letter to Partington had not been found; all that existed was a notebook belonging to his secretary and companion Carrie Christiansen.

Partington concluded that Bierce deliberately concealed his true whereabouts when he finally went to a selected location in the Grand Canyon and died as a result of suicide.

[61] Oral tradition in Sierra Mojada, Coahuila documented by priest James Lienert states that Bierce was executed by firing squad in the town's cemetery.

[62] Bierce has been fictionalized in more than 50 novels, short stories, movies, television shows, stage plays, and comic books.

Most of these works draw upon Bierce's vivid personality, colorful wit, relationships with famous people such as Jack London and William Randolph Hearst, or, quite frequently, his mysterious disappearance.

Bierce has been portrayed by such well-known authors as Ray Bradbury,[63] Jack Finney,[64] Carlos Fuentes,[65] Winston Groom,[66] Robert Heinlein,[67] and Don Swaim.

[68] Some works featuring a fictional Ambrose Bierce have received favorable reviews, generated international sales,[69] or earned major awards.

Bierce's short stories, "Haita the Shepherd" and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" are believed to have influenced early weird fiction writer Robert W. Chambers' tales of The King in Yellow (1895), which featured Hastur, Carcosa, Lake Hali and other names and locations initiated in these tales.

[72] A French version called La Rivière du Hibou, directed by Robert Enrico, was released in 1962;[73] this black-and-white film faithfully recounts the original narrative using voiceover.

[82] Biographer Richard O'Connor argued that, "War was the making of Bierce as a man and a writer... [he became] truly capable of transferring the bloody, headless bodies and boar-eaten corpses of the battlefield onto paper.