The Letters of Ambrose Bierce

The
Letters of Ambrose Bierce

EDITED BY

Bertha Clark Pope

WITH A MEMOIR BY

George Sterling

San Francisco

The Book Club of California

1922

In reproducing these letters we have followed as nearly as possible the originalmanuscripts. This inevitably has caused a certain lack of uniformity throughoutthe volume, as in the case of the names of magazines and newspapers, whichare sometimes italicized and sometimes in quotation marks.—The Editor.

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE CALIFORNIA BOOK CLUB

The Introduction

by Bertha Clark Pope

"The question that starts to the lips of ninety-nine readersvout of a hundred," says Arnold Bennett, in a reviewin the London New Age in 1909, "even thebest informed, will assuredly be: 'Who is Ambrose Bierce?'I scarcely know, but I will say that among what I may term'underground reputations' that of Ambrose Bierce is perhapsthe most striking example. You may wander for yearsthrough literary circles and never meet anybody who hasheard of Ambrose Bierce, and then you may hear some eruditestudent whisper in an awed voice: 'Ambrose Bierce isthe greatest living prose writer.' I have heard such an opinionexpressed."

Bierce himself shows his recognition of the "underground"quality of his reputation in a letter to George Sterling: "Howmany times, and during a period of how many years mustone's unexplainable obscurity be pointed out to constitutefame? Not knowing, I am almost disposed to consider myselfthe most famous of authors. I have pretty nearly ceasedto be 'discovered,' but my notoriety as an obscurian may besaid to be worldwide and everlasting."

Anything which would throw light on such a figure, at onceobscure and famous, is valuable. These letters of AmbroseviBierce, here printed for the first time, are therefore of unusualinterest. They are the informal literary work—the termis used advisedly—of a man esteemed great by a small butacutely critical group, read enthusiastically by a somewhatlarger number to whom critical examination of what theyread seldom occurs, and ignored by the vast majority of readers;a man at once more hated and more adored than any onthe Pacific Coast; a man not ten years off the scene yet alreadybecome a tradition and a legend; whose life, no less than hisdeath, held elements of mystery, baffling contradictions, problemsfor puzzled con