About the Author

AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914?) was one of nineteenth-century America's most renowned satirists. The author of short stories, essays, fables, poems, and sketches, he was a popular columnist and wrote for several San Francisco and London newspapers during his forty-year journalism career. DAVID E. SCHULTZ is a technical editor. He is coeditor, with S. T. Joshi, of both A Sole Survivor, a collection of Bierce autobiographical writings, and Lord of a Visible World, an autobiography-in-letters of H. P. Lovecraft. S. T. JOSHI is a freelance writer and editor. He is the editor of The Collected Fables of Ambrose Bierce and author of H. P. Lovecraft: A Life.

Reviews

This carefully edited manuscript will add immeasurably to Bierce studies.--Joseph B. McCullough "University of Nevada-Las Vegas"

This is a work of genuinely impressive scholarship and will undoubtedly become the authoritative text for Bierce's Devil's Dictionary.--Thomas V. Quirk "University of Missouri-Columbia"

A compilation of all of Bierce's satirical definitions published over a forty-year period, this latest version of the Dictionary ('A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic') merits a wide readership both within and without the Academy ('A modern school where football is taught').--American Literary Review

Bierce was America's first realist writer, but, unlike realism's later practitioners, he knew something about reality--it's really funny.--P. J. O'Rourke

Most readers and biographers have agreed with Schultz and Joshi that The Devil's Dictionary is 'quintessential Bierce.' For the serious student of Bierce's diabolical lexicon, their beautiful new edition . . . will be a delight.--Sewanee Review

Splendidly produced.--London Times Literary Supplement