The Devil in the Details - Cynic’s Progress

From the time when people could actually read. Always intriguing, he was the mystery man of American Letters. m/r

Cynic’s Progress | The Weekly Standard

The brave life and mysterious death of Ambrose Bierce.

Andrew Ferguson

December 30 - January 6, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 16

One golden autumn morning 100 years ago, a few blocks from where I’m writing these words in northwest Washington, D.C., Ambrose Bierce said goodbye to his secretary, turned the key in the door to his apartment on Logan Circle, and went off to God knows where.

I’m not speaking figuratively: God and nobody else knows where Ambrose Bierce ended up—or when, how, or why. He had taken September and early October to settle his personal affairs, as people used to say. His literary affairs had been settled with the publication of his collected works, more than a million words packed into 12 volumes and assembled over a period of five years, which signaled his official exit from the writing life. His two sons were dead, his estranged wife was dead, and his daughter Helen, though not quite estranged, had built a life for herself a safe distance from him, in the Midwest. 

Bierce sent Helen a letter before he left Washington. He told her he wanted to walk the battlefields where he had fought 50 years before as a first lieutenant in the 9th Indiana Infantry. He wanted to look a last time at Kennesaw Mountain, Chickamauga, Franklin, Nashville, Missionary Ridge, and Murfreesboro. Then, he said, he would turn further south, into Mexico, to see firsthand the Mexican civil war and its most romantic figure, the revolutionary Pancho Villa, who had struck his interest. From there, he’d move on to South America. 

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