Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce [Paperback]

Ambrose Bierce (Author), David J. Klooster (Author, Editor), Russell Duncan (Author, Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 7, 2002

Alone among important American writers, Ambrose Bierce fought for four years in the Civil War. The writings he produced about that conflict comprise a body of work unique in our nation's literature. This volume gathers for the first time virtually everything Bierce wrote about the war, from letters composed on the field of battle to maps he drew as a topographical engineer, from his masterful short stories to his final bittersweet ruminations before he disappeared into Mexico in 1914. The collection is organized chronologically, following Bierce's participation in a wide range of battles, from the early skirmishes in the West Virginia mountains to the bloodbaths at Shiloh and Chickamauga and his near fatal wounding at Kennesaw Mountain. His overlapping accounts of these events provide a clear and compelling record of the sights and sounds of the battlefield, the psycho-logical traumas the war induced in its soldiers, and the memories that would haunt survivors for the rest of their lives. In prose that anticipates the work of Ernest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien, Bierce's writings unflinchingly tell the truth about the war. Writing in the 1880s and 1890s, at a time when both the North and South were erecting monuments to the heroes and glories of the war, Bierce insisted that his readers confront what really happened. Rather than celebrate causes and comrades, Bierce's fiction and memoirs describe the impossibly brutal realities of the Civil War battlefield. The volume includes a biographical introduction and comprehensive notes on all the writings and is suitable for classroom adoption and general readers alike.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In calling Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman our poets of the American Civil War, we unfairly neglect the Ohio-born Bierce, who, unlike the first two authors, actually fought for the Union army, at Chicamauga, Missionary Ridge, Bloody Shiloh, and elsewhere. If the average reader is at all aware of Bierce, it is probably from a few choice definitions from The Devil's Dictionary, the phantasmagoric story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and the author's mysterious disappearance in Mexico in 1913. However, Bierce, whose nastiness toward contemporary writers and critics came home to roost when his own reputation had to be decided, deserves to be better known. His war experience gives the 27 brief war stories in Shadows of Blue & Gray the ring of authenticity. In a sometimes turgid writing style (slaves are once described, for example, as "sons and daughters of Ham"), Bierce depicts a war that is at once horrifying, pointless, and supernatural the stuff of The Twilight Zone. The nine pieces in "Memoirs and Chronicles" and "Reminiscence and Memoria," with which editor Thomsen fittingly rounds out this volume, are as artful as the fictions. Recommended for all libraries. Despite the strengths of Thomsen's collection, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period is a superior work, for it includes not only all of Bierce's short fiction and nonfiction about the Civil War but a detailed 25-page introduction that is invaluable in placing Bierce in historical context and thus helping to explain his stance as a realist about the war and a satirist about post-Civil War American self-congratulation and heroic myth-making. Duncan (American history, Univ. of Copenhagen) and Klooster (English, Hope Coll.) wisely organize Bierce's myriad stories, memoirs, letters, newspaper columns, and even war poems around the war's five-year duration. Instead of a curmudgeon who happened to write war stories, this volume portrays a man who joined the Union army at age 20, fought in the bloodiest battles until a Confederate bullet in the head took him out of combat, and revisited the battlefields and retrieved the experience in memory until his disappearance. Highly recommended for all libraries. Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Here is exemplary American prose, and here is the real war -- without uplift, without virtue, without purpose." -- Benjamin Schwarz

Bierce writes with great strength and never hides from us the ugliness of war. -- William S. McFeely

This book makes a highly significant contribution to American literary studies. -- Michael W. Schaefer, author of "Just What War Is: The Civil War Writings of De Forest and Bierce"

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr (January 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155849328X
• ISBN-13: 978-1558493285
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,179,459 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better late than never, July 3, 2009

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This review is from: Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce (Paperback)

I found this book through Drew Gilpin Faust's book, and I am grateful to her for citing it. (Her book-The Republic of Suffering-is also highly recommended, but hardly needs recommending, since it already sold well). Bierce was well known in his time, but he is also timely now, when we once again glorify war and dying for dubious causes, to which we give grandiloquent names. Bierce calls things by their real names and earned the right. He fought almost four years in the Civil War, surviving innumerable battles before a head wound ended his military service. Then his real work began.