The Devil's Dictionaries: The Best of the Devil's Dictionary and the American Heretic's Dictionary

Ambrose Bierce

Aug 2004 · See Sharp Press

About this ebook

This compilation of hundreds of biting, witty, cruel, and hilarious definitions combines the best 200 definitions from Ambrose Bierce’s classic The Devil’s Dictionary, with more than 500 definitions from the most humorous and stinging entries in Chaz Bufe’s The American Heretic’s Dictionary. This new edition includes 50 new definitions from Bufe and new biting illustrations by San Francisco artist and filmmaker J. R. Swanson. The Bierce definitions focus on his favorite targets, including religion, jingoism masquerading as patriotism, the “lickspittle” press, the thievery inherent in the American economic system, and the multitude of idiocies and hypocrisies pervading American social and political life. Bufe’s definitions share many of the same targets, but also skewer such contemporary plagues as the “right to life” movement, religious fundamentalism, the IRS, and the puritanically “politically correct.” Bufe also turns a jaundiced eye on both male and female sexual attitudes, something which Bierce, writing in much more conservative times, was not free to do.

About the author

Ambrose Bierce was one of the most famous and iconoclastic American writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chaz Bufe is the author of The Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations, An Understandable Guide to Music Theory, and Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? He lives in Tucson, Arizona.