Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce

Ambrose Bierce was the American journalist and satirist whose Devil's Dictionary — a collection of sardonic redefinitions published serially between 1881 and 1906 — remains the sharpest single-volume assault on human self-deception in the English language. Born in Ohio in 1842, he served in the Union Army at Shiloh and Chickamauga and carried the war's capacity for destruction into his prose. His short stories, many set during the Civil War, have the cold precision of someone who has seen men die and found the universe indifferent. He disappeared in Mexico in 1913 or 1914, aged seventy-one, having gone to observe the revolution — an exit so characteristic it might have been planned. His definition of friendship — a ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, only one in foul — is the summary of a man who trusted very few people and was proved right.