Ambrose Bierce

On December 25, 1871, he married Mary Ellen "Mollie" Day. The couple had two sons, Day and Leigh and a daughter, Helen.

In 1888, he separated from his wife after he found letters for Mary from an admirer. They eventually got divorced in 1904. She died on April 27, 1905.

While Day took his life in 1889 following a romantic rejection, Leigh succumbed to pneumonia in 1901.

He was born on June 24, 1842, in Meigs County, Ohio in a log cabin, in a poor family to Marcus Aurelius Bierce and Laura Sherwood Bierce as their tenth child among thirteen children.

His father was a farmer who named all his children with ‘A’ as the starting letter.

He was raised in Kosciusko County, Indiana where he studied at the local high school.

At 15 years of age he left home and joined a newspaper as an apprentice.

In 1861 at the outbreak of the ‘American Civil War’, he was recruited in the ‘Union Army’ and commissioned at its ‘9th Indiana Infantry Regiment’. He took part in the 1861 ‘Operations in Western Virginia’ campaign and was present during the ‘Battle of Philippi’ on June 3, 1861.

He began his career as a journalist in San Francisco, where he stayed for several years, after resigning from the ‘Union Army’.

In 1872 he moved to England where he contributed to the London magazines ‘Figaro’ and ‘Fun’ and took forward his writing career. ‘The Friend’s Delight’, a collection of his articles, was his first book that came out under the pseudonym Dod Grile. It was published in London by John Camden Hotten in 1873.

His two other books published during this time were ‘Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California’ in 1872 and ‘Cobwebs from an Empty Skull’ in 1874.

In 1875 he returned to San Francisco.

After a stint as an associate editor of ‘Argonaut’ from 1877 till sometime in 1879-80, he went to Rockerville in Dakota Territory where he served a New York based mining company as its regional manager. Following the failure of the company, he returned to San Francisco.

‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, one of the most popular and widely read short stories, is not only considered his finest work but also enlists as one of the flawless and remarkable literary creations in the history of American literature. Adaptations of the story include a silent film, ‘The Bridge’ in 1929 and the American and French versions of ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes in 1964.