Through the latter part of the nineteenth century there existed in the United States a peculiar literary phenomenon, the underground reputation of Ambrose Bierce. The fiction reading public did not know this man; the readers of “yellow” journalism knew him as a Hearst writer, even more brilliant and cynical than the average. But now and then you would come upon an expert in the literary craft, who would tell you that Ambrose Bierce was a short-story writer and satirist without equal in America, the greatest genius our literature had produced. You would set out to look for these obscure writings, and could not find them in the libraries or the book-stores. At last you might get someone to lend you a copy, and then you would join the campaign of whispering. Now Bierce is coming into his own. The public is hearing about him. He is of especial interest to us here, because he spent his energy in attacking, with the utmost possible fury, the thesis of this book; while at the same time, both in his life and his writings, he vindicated that thesis to the last syllable. Ambrose Bierce was bom in 1842, the son of a poor farmer in Ohio. At the age of nineteen he enlisted and fought through the Civil war, being twice wounded and brevetted major. Then he became a journalist, first in San Francisco, then in London, finally in Washington and New York. He was one of the most ethical men that ever lived, a born preacher, as vehement and persistent as Carlyle. He fought for his beliefs, and shrank from no sacrifice in their behalf. He was no man’s man, but said what he thought, no matter how bitter and fierce it might be. He paid the penalty in a host of enemies and a lifetime of struggle. That such a man should have taken up with art-for-art’s-sake theories is assuredly a quaint incongruity in the history of literature. But so it happened. He looked out upon America, and saw the grafters thriving, he saw corruption enthroned as a political system, and he gave up the human race in despair: “a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions--frothing mad.” These phrases occur in an article, “To Train a Writer”; and you can see what sort of writer it would train! A writer who renounces solidarity, and seeks refuge in his own talent, the one place where a man is master, where he can make beauty, order and dignity. So let us live in the world of art, let us consecrate ourselves to its service, and waste no love upon “the irreclaimable mass of brutality that we know as ‘mankind.’”