Tales of Soldiers and Civilians: and Other Stories

Front Cover
Penguin, 2000 M02 1 - 304 pages
Questing after Pancho Villa's revolutionary forces, Ambrose Bierce rode into Mexico in 1913 and was never seen again. He left behind him theDevil's Dictionary and a remarkable body of short fiction.

This new collection gathers some of Bierce's finest stories, including the celebrated Civil War fictions 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' and 'Chickamauga', his macabre masterpieces, and his tales of supernatural horror. Reminiscent of Poe, these stories are marked by a sardonic humour and a realistic study of tense emotional states.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

 

Selected pages

Contents

A Horseman in the Sky
5
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
11
Chickamauga
20
A Son of the Gods
26
One of the Missing
32
Killed at Resaca
43
The Affair at Coulters Notch
49
The Coup De Grace
57
The Realm of the Unreal
157
The Damned Thing
164
Haita the Shepherd
172
Present at a Hanging
179
A Wireless Message
181
Three and One Are One
185
A Bottomless Grave
193
Jupiter Doke BrigadierGeneral
200

Parker Adderson Philosopher
63
An Affair of Outposts
69
The Story of a Conscience
78
One Kind of Officer
85
The MockingBird
95
The Man Out of the Nose
103
The Man and the Snake
110
The Boarded Window
117
Moxons Master
127
A Tough Tussle
136
A Resumed Identity
143
The NightDoings at Deadmans
149
The City of the Gone Away
209
The Majors Tale
215
Curried Cow
222
A Revolt of the Gods
228
My Favorite Murder
233
Oil of Dog
241
A Bivouac of the Dead
247
The Short Story
253
EXPLANATORY NOTES
261
GLOSSARY OF MILITARY TERMS
269
BATTLE SITES AND BATTLE LEADERS
271
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2000)

Tom Quirk is the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the editor of the Penguin Classics editions of Mark Twain's Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches (1994) and Ambrose Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories (2000) and co-editor of The Portable American Realism Reader (1997). His other books include Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn (1993), Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997) and Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination (2001).

Bibliographic information