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    A Study Guide for Ambrose Bierce's A Horseman in the Sky
    A Study Guide for Ambrose Bierce's A Horseman in the Sky
    A Study Guide for Ambrose Bierce's A Horseman in the Sky
    Ebook39 pages30 minutes

    A Study Guide for Ambrose Bierce's A Horseman in the Sky

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Ambrose Bierce's "A Horseman in the Sky," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 21, 2015
    ISBN9781535816762
    A Study Guide for Ambrose Bierce's A Horseman in the Sky

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Ambrose Bierce's A Horseman in the Sky - Gale

      09

      A Horseman in the Sky

      Ambrose Bierce

      1889

      Introduction

      Ambrose Bierce's short story A Horseman in the Sky was first published in the San Francisco Examiner on April 14, 1889. Bierce presented a slightly altered version in his anthology Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891 (which was not sold until the first weeks of 1892). That version of the story also appeared in the edition of his complete works that Bierce oversaw in 1911, and it has been widely anthologized ever since. Recently it has appeared in Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce, edited by Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster and published in 2002.

      Bierce enlisted to fight in the Civil War in the first rush of patriotic fervor that swept through the country in the spring of 1861, and he became a heroic and then an experienced soldier and officer. After the war he became an important newspaper columnist and author, noted for his cynical attacks on the complacencies of American culture, which earned him the sobriquet Bitter Bierce. In A Horseman in the Sky, he mixes together the extreme realism of a veteran writing about the Civil War with fantastic religious and visionary elements that would later become characteristic of the literary style of magic realism. Bierce's purpose was to show through symbol and irony that the sentimental conception of the Civil War that was becoming prevalent in America in the Gilded Age amounted to a hypocritical betrayal of the real meaning that the war had in the lives of the soldiers who fought in it as well as an attempt to cover over the scars that were left on American life and history.

      Author Biography

      Ambrose Bierce was born Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce on June 4, 1842, in the Western Reserve, Ohio. His ancestors had been Puritans from Scotland who joined the colony of Connecticut. Ambrose was of a different temperament, however, and felt estranged and neglected by the patriarchal rule of his father, Marcus Aurelius Bierce, over the family. He looked on the coming of the Civil War as a deliverance, allowing him to set out on his own. He volunteered only three days after the outbreak of war on April 12, 1861; in fact, he went to the recruiting office for the Ninth Indiana Regiment the night before it opened and was the second man in line. He rose rapidly through the ranks and became an officer as a result of numerous citations for physical bravery in the face of the enemy.

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