The Devil's Dictionary

Ambrose Bierce

2009-01 · The Floating Press

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Dive into a masterpiece of American satirical writing. The Devil's Dictionary, compiled by famed American journalist and fiction writer Ambrose Bierce, offers readers a compendium of words and phrases with dictionary-style definitions that are blisteringly hilarious and packed with spot-on cynicism and dark humor. The format makes this book a great text for dipping into any time you need a quick laugh.

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Ambrose Bierce was a brilliant, bitter, and cynical journalist. He is also the author of several collections of ironic epigrams and at least one powerful story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Bierce was born in Ohio, where he had an unhappy childhood. He served in the Union army during the Civil War. Following the war, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a columnist for the newspaper the Examiner, for which he wrote a number of satirical sketches. Bierce wrote a number of horror stories, some poetry, and countless essays. He is best known, however, for The Cynic's Word Book (1906), retitled The Devil's Dictionary in 1911, a collection of such cynical definitions as "Marriage: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two." Bierce's own marriage ended in divorce, and his life ended mysteriously. In 1913, he went to Mexico and vanished, presumably killed in the Mexican revolution.