AMBROSE BIERCE (1842- ca.1914)

Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, Bierce's first collection of short stories, is also his best and most well known work. In ten soldier stories and nine civilian tales, Bierce displays the literary style for which he is famous: an eccentric taste for the bizarre, sardonic and cynical. In the soldier's story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," the tale of a hanging, the reader is shocked, perhaps even a little cheated, by the unexpected ending. In the civilian tale, "A Watcher of the Dead," a weird story about a strange wager concerning a dead body, one is kept in a state of suspended horror. In reading Bierce's Tales, it is tempting to make comparisons with Edgar Allan Poe or O. Henry - comparisons which always annoyed Bierce.

Tales was rejected by leading publishers and had to be privately printed and financed by Bierce's merchant friend, E. L. G. Steele. Copies were bound in grey, brown and green cloth, with the title and author's name stamped in gold on the spine and diagonally across the lower fore-edge corner of the front cover. The copy displayed is in grey cloth.