{"id":23445,"date":"2013-12-23T14:04:18","date_gmt":"2013-12-23T19:04:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23445"},"modified":"2013-12-23T14:04:18","modified_gmt":"2013-12-23T19:04:18","slug":"ambrose-bierce-remembered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/12\/23\/ambrose-bierce-remembered\/","title":{"rendered":"Ambrose Bierce, remembered"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Weekly Standard<\/em>, Andrew Ferguson<\/a> recounts the life and (theories about the) death of Ambrose Bierce:<\/p>\n

“We have produced but one genuine wit,\u201d H.\u2009L. Mencken wrote, in a survey of American letters: \u201cAmbrose Bierce. And save to a small circle he is unknown today.\u201d Mencken was writing decades after Bierce had gone off to Mexico, by which time his life was best remembered for the way he had left it. And the circle of those who read him is even smaller now, needless to say. When the Library of America finally got around to issuing a canonical selection of his writing, in 2011, the single volume (Philip Roth got nine!) was relatively slender; it was the 219th in the library\u2019s series of great American writers. <\/p>\n

His fame was not general, even at its most robust. Those who admired him, mostly his fellow writers, admired him extravagantly. He was a \u201cwriter\u2019s writer,\u201d in the deadly phrase. The tributes from William Gladstone, Arnold Bennett, Bret Harte, and many other popular and learned literary men shared a common thread: Why, they all asked, wasn\u2019t Bierce better known? Bierce himself ached for fame as awfully as any writer, but was, in time, amused by the strange status he had achieved: He was famous for not being famous. He wrote to a friend toward the end of his life:<\/p>\n