BIERCE, Ambrose

A courageous independent author, of an adventurous character more possible in the United States than in Europe, Bierce belongs to the avant-garde tradition less for his fiction, which was no less conventional when it was written than it is today, than for his aphorisms, which are distinctly original precisely for their dictionary-like form and their critical intelligence. Indeed, this tart inversion of both the lexicographical and aphoristic tradition gives his concise paragraphs a distinctly modernist...