Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?), journalist and master of the short story, was born in Ohio, the tenth of thirteen children. At the outset of the Civil War, Bierce joined the army and chronicled what he saw in several short stories, including the well-known “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and the memoir What I Saw of Shiloh. In 1913 he traveled as an observer of Pancho Villa’s army and vanished without a trace in one of the most famous disappearances in American literary history.