A dentist, wrote Ambrose Bierce, was “a prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coins out of your pocket.” Politeness, “the most acceptable hypocrisy.” A year, a “period of three ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. "Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate,” wrote the sardonic writer Ambrose Bierce. Bierce was ...

Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton is usually linked to the Big Easy rather than the Big Orange: “New Orleans is the cradle of jazz,” he once boasted, “and I, myself, happened to be the creator.” But Phil ...

Set alongside other fiction about the Civil War, Ambrose Bierce’s stories can seem brutal and terse, mocking the culture that romanticized the conflict and grew fat with pride. “Death upon a field of ...

Ebenezer Scrooge took only one night to change his tune from “Bah! Humbug!” to “God bless us, every one!” Ambrose Bierce was made of sterner stuff. He reviled the holiday (and just about everything ...

Ambrose Bierce may have been the wit and conscience of his era (1842–1914?), but as refashioned for the stage by playwright Mac Wellman, shaped by director James Martin, and embodied by actor John ...

The collapse of the U.S.-backed regime in Afghanistan is a fine time to dip into one of America’s most penetrating and underappreciated political analysts – Ambrose Bierce. The political establishment ...