The devil's dictionary

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913?) was one of the leading men of letters in nineteenth-century America and a Civil War veteran. He served as a first lieutenant in the Union Army's 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. After the war he became a regular columnist at The San Francisco Examiner and one of the most influential journalists on the West Coast. In addition to his journalistic work, he wrote piercingly about the ghastly things he had seen in the war and was a pioneer of the psychological horror story. At the age of seventy-one Bierce disappeared while joining Pancho Villa's army as an observer of the Mexican Revolution, and, in spite of multiple investigations, his ultimate fate remains unknown.

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History, n. an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all two. Self-Esteem, n. An erroneous appraisement. These caustic aphorisms, collected in The Devil's Dictionary, helped earn Ambrose Bierce the epithets Bitter Bierce, the Devil's Lexicographer, and the Wickedest Man in San Francisco. First published as The Cynic's Word Book (1906) and later reissued under its preferred name in 1911, Bierce's notorious collection of barbed definitions forcibly contradicts Samuel Johnson's earlier definition of a lexicographer as a harmless drudge. There was nothing harmless about Ambrose Bierce, and the words he shaped into verbal pitchforks a century ago--with or without the devil's help--can still draw blood today.

'The corrosive insights of Ambrose Bierce seem as bitter and fresh as ever. He handles words with delicious precision'
'If one book should be issued to every child at birth, this is it ... What is extraordinary about Bierce's waspish definitions is how accurate they seem, more than a century after he wrote them ... This edition is exuberantly illustrated by Ralph Steadman ... Everyone should buy this, and learn from it'
'A superb book. Steadman has always been one of my heroes'
'An American classic, some of its charming (and cynical) definitions are uncannily appropriate to our own day and would make it, I fancy, an ideal Christmas stocking present'