Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born in 1842 into a fairly poor family as the youngest of nine children. He lived in a log cabin in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio as a child. The only formal education he ever received was a single year at the Kentucky Military Institute when he was seventeen years of age. He enlisted with the Ninth Indian Infantry as a drummer boy in the Civil War. Then, in 1864, he was wounded and left the war to live with one of his brothers in San Francisco. There he began his career as a newspaper writer and published his first short story, "The Haunted Valley," in the Overland Magazine in 1871. After marriage, Ambrose lived in London for five years. There he was accepted into the "Fleet Street Gang," a social Parthenon of prominent authors, critics, editors, and "pub-crawlers." After returning to the United States, he spent the year of 1880 gold mining and shotgun riding in the Black Hills of South Dakota for Wells Fargo & Company but returned to his family in San Francisco. He became editor-in-chief of the weekly Wasp with the New Year's Day edition, 1881. He went on to write many more short stories, and his first collection, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, was published in 1891. In 1893, Can Such Things Be? appeared, Bierce's second and most famous collection of fiction. One of his most recognized short stories, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," was one of the many stories included in his earliest compilations, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, and later in the 1906 release of The Devil's Dictionary.
             In the written story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," a planter, Peyton Farquhar, is being hanged at Owl Creek Bridge in Northern Alabama. He is being hanged because he hinted to a Federal Spy, unbeknown to him, that he planned to burn Owl Creek Bridge. There are several differences between the written version of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and the later short film version. Of course, in the written vers...