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    The Devil's Dictionary
    The Devil's Dictionary
    The Devil's Dictionary
    Ebook140 pages2 hours

    The Devil's Dictionary

    By Ambrose Bierce and Ralph Steadman

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Bierce's classic work of satirical wit and Steadman's pointed pen redefine the way we see even the seemingly simplest of terms.
    Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from but not well enough to lend to. Bride, n.: A woman with a great future behind her. Consult, v: To seek another's approval of a course already decided on.
    Ambrose Bierce's "dictionary" of epigrams, essays, verses, and vignettes targets the religious, the romantic, the political, and the economic, in equal measure. The book you need to define both friends and enemies, The Devil's Dictionary is also the perfect gift, showcasing Bierce's razor-sharp wit and Ralph Steadman's incisive pen to their best advantage.
    Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), friend and rival of Mark Twain, was one of nineteenth-century America's most renowned satirists. A Union veteran of the Civil War, he became one of the best-known writers and journalists in the country. In 1913 he set off for Mexico, then in the throes of revolution, and was never seen again.
    Ralph Steadman, artist, writer, sculptor, political cartoonist, and designer of labels for vintage wines, is the author/illustrator of, most recently, the novel Doodaaa, as well as the illustrator of Lewis Carroll's Alice, George Orwell's Animal Farm, and Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. His work appears regularly in such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Esquire, and The Los Angeles Times.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateOct 1, 2010
    ISBN9781608196029
    Author

    Ambrose Bierce

    Ambrose Bierce was an American writer, critic and war veteran. Bierce fought for the Union Army during the American Civil War, eventually rising to the rank of brevet major before resigning from the Army following an 1866 expedition across the Great Plains. Bierce’s harrowing experiences during the Civil War, particularly those at the Battle of Shiloh, shaped a writing career that included editorials, novels, short stories and poetry. Among his most famous works are “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “The Boarded Window,” “Chickamauga,” and What I Saw of Shiloh. While on a tour of Civil-War battlefields in 1913, Bierce is believed to have joined Pancho Villa’s army before disappearing in the chaos of the Mexican Revolution.

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    Reviews for The Devil's Dictionary

    4.5/5

    19 ratings15 reviews

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    • 3/5
      By turns satirical, biting, vicious, nihilistic, racist, misogynistic, and downright mean. Exhausting on the whole I confess to not reading most of the poems, which I did not find amusing at all.
    • 5/5
      You can't go wrong with the Dover Thrift Edition of Bierce's caustic and hilarious 'dictionary'. An American classic. Read it.
    • 4/5
      Provided you have a pretty firm grounding in 19th century culture, The Devil's Dictionary is great fun--arguably one of the wittiest satires to come out of an entire generation. But it's not a book to read cover to cover. Keep it in your bathroom--or put it in your guest bedroom to help you weed out friends who don't have a sense of humor!
    • 4/5
      This is an irreverent literary foray from a curmudgeon who lived an adventurous life. His civil war experience was put to good use in his stories. His journalistic career lasted until 1913 when, at the age of seventy-one, he left for Mexico and was never heard from again. Fortunately he left behind this book of cynical and satirical definitions that show off the underside of humanity. Some definitions are short essays while others provide an opportunity for Bierce to display some verse. He even included some brief dialogues as demonstration of the definition when it took his fancy. Charmingly eccentric these definitions often lay bare the truth of human foibles. I find them worth reading and rereading as a reminder of what makes some of us tick.
    • 4/5
      This is the book that never seemed to end - reading it was a bit like the riddle of the frog who can only jump halfway to the finish line, never reaching it. Luckily, I did. This is the perfect book for nighttime reading. No plot, just interesting definitions to well known word. Some of the language and words were outdated or not used and I had to look it up in a dictionary (Regular), but most of Ambrose Beirce's observations are spot on. My favorite has to be the definition for Logic. A must read for those interested in American Writing.
    • 3/5
      First published in 1906 under the title "The Cynic's Word Book," "The Devil's Dictionary" is exactly what (both) the titles announce: a dictionary of words defined with a devilishly cynical mindset.I was researching 19th Century American writers when I found Ambrose Bierce, who immediately struck me as an interesting character. He was born in a small coal mining town and later became an apprentice at a printing shop, before enlisting in the Union army during the Civil War. His family life was tragic, and his literary life controversial. His later years are shrouded in mystery, as he disappeared without a trace into Mexico, and the date and circumstances of his death are completely unknown. My interest in Bierce led me to discovering his dictionary. I immediately loved the sound of the idea, and read it straight through one night with a cup of black coffee (I normally drink it sweetened, but bitter just seemed more appropriate).I didn't find this book as uproariously, timelessly hilarious as Amazon promised me I would.In fact, timeless is not a word that I would use to describe it. Maybe Amazon was referring to an edited version? Mine included a lot of words, jargon, lingo and references to sayings that went completely over my head as a reader in 2012. I'm sure that if I had been a reader in, rather, 1912, I would have marveled at Bierce's satiric wit and twists of phrases. But I found myself, at these instances, only wishing that the publisher had added in some enlightening notes.Bierce covers a wide array of poking fun. There are the politically-incorrect entries:- "ABORIGINES, n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize."- "AIR, n. A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor."The domestic affairs entries:- "BRUTE, n. See HUSBAND."- "BEAUTY, n. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband."- "HOUSELESS, adj. Having paid all taxes on household goods."- "LOVE, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage..."The church and state entries:- "ALDERMAN, n. An ingenious criminal who covers his secret thieving with a pretense of open marauding."- "ALLIANCE, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third."- "WALL STREET, n. A symbol for sin."- "PRIMATE, n. The head of a church..."- "INFIDEL, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does."(That last one I found particularly insightful and one of my favorite in the book).And others I found notably funny:- "CIRCUS, n. A place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool."- "CLAIRVOYANT, n. A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron, namely, that he is a blockhead."- "DUEL, Once, a long time ago, a man died in a duel."- "MOUSE, n. An animal which strews its path with fainting women. As in Rome Christians were thrown to the lions, so centuries earlier... female heretics were thrown to the mice."- "RAMSHACKLE, adj. Pertaining to a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as the Normal American."So, yes, I did find a few laughs in this book, and I am glad to have read it. On the other hand, I found many of the poems used as examples of using given words in sentences annoying, the frequent defining of mythical creatures and places jarring, and certain concepts over-used and no longer half so funny by the time I got to the letter M. Bierce especially wears out his use of pickpockets, and the word appeared so many times I do not think that I will ever be able to see pickpockets in a comical light again. I don't think it would have been possible to squeeze in another pickpocket metaphor no matter how funny Bierce (and his editors) seemed to think them.And so, I only passably enjoyed this non-typical dictionary.But, who knows, maybe reading this was just making me cynical.
    • 5/5
      An abridged version of the classic work. The definitions will leave you roaring with delight, and sometimes guffawing in recognition.
    • 5/5
      You can't go wrong with the Dover Thrift Edition of Bierce's caustic and hilarious 'dictionary'. An American classic. Read it.
    • 5/5
      There may be none, outside of perhaps Rabelais, who may so decorously handle the refuse of the world. The Devil's Dictionary is a guidebook for the mind of man, and perhaps a certain delicacy becomes necessary when exploring something so rude and unappealing. There is perhaps no greater illustration that the answer of 'why do bad things happen to good people' is: because it is much funnier that way.
    • 2/5
      I'm not sure whether I just didn't enjoy this book, or if I didn't enjoy reading it via dailyLit.com. I think, though, that it's the book's fault. You don't have to read much past the first few letters of the alphabet to see what Bierce's hobby-horses are: religion, women, other writers, etc. He really doesn't cover much new territory, and what he does seems to have been done by better satirists. His aphorisms don't have the comic touches of Twain at his best, and his diatribes don't come anywhere near Voltaire or Swift. What's left is too few bright spots in an otherwise disappointing series or predictable targets and predictable satire against them. Maybe I'm just turning into an old, curmudgeonly fart, but this book just didn't do it for me.
    • 4/5
      As brilliant as many of the individual definitions are, reading this book from cover to cover is a bit of a chore.
    • 4/5
      Brilliant. If you're looking to expand your vocabulary, you can do no better. At some times he writes succinctly, allowing his ready wit to strike freely. At other times Bierce' writing assumes a prolixity worthy of the dryest of scholars, giving the dictionary a faux-pomposity which perfectly enhances the ridiculousness of the things he's put on paper.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant. Bierce is biting and never tongue-in-cheek, always cynical, and always funny. This is a great work to pick up and flip through whenever one is feeling sad, bored, or a little too warm-hearted.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic. If you love words, puns, or concise writing, this is one you'll love. If you're a fan of American Literature in the late 19th Century, this is one of the funniest compilations to come from the period. I'm hoping to find an unabridged version to replace my rinky-dink one. It stands next to Sam'l Johnson on my desk.
    • 5/5
      every satirist needs this book. i use it many times through the year.

    Book preview

    The Devil's Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce

    THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

    AMBROSE BIERCE

    Illustrated by

    RALPH STEADMAN

    Introduction by Angus Calder

    CONTENTS

    Frontispiece

    Introduction by Angus Calder

    Publisher's Note

    THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY

    INTRODUCTION

    Angus Calder

    Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913?) despised realism. In his Devil's Dictionary he defines it as 'The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads . . . or a story written by a measuring worm.' Assuming that his own life was a fiction, who would credit as 'realistic' either its beginning or end – the bizarre circumstance of his naming, 'Ambrose Gwynett,' and the extraordinary fact that one of America's most celebrated literary men and public figures could disappear totally without trace on an actual or fabricated excursion into Mexico to view the battles of its revolution?

    Rather more mundanely, there is a staring contradiction between the personality projected in his journalistic writings – that of a cynical misanthrope and intractable misogynist, despairing of all politicians and their isms, venomously antipathetic to all religious belief and to clerics of every known or conceivable creed, and scathing in his invective against writers, famous and obscure, whom he considered bad – and the person exposed by attentive biographers. The atrabilious Bierce persona of the Dictionary was the mask of a much hurt man.

    Though he quarrelled with many friends sooner or later, he always had ample to choose from. Perhaps because they thought they knew that his contempt for females was a pose, numerous women were amongst the young writers who flocked for advice to the Dr. Johnson of San Francisco, the literary arbiter of West Coast America, and to whom he was unflaggingly kind and supportive. 'Bitter Bierce', 'The Wickedest Man in San Francisco,' somehow survived, with a rich sunset glow of reputation, a long journalistic career in which he raked with wit and sarcasm which resounded across America and then over the Atlantic, fellow writers as famous as Henry James and Stephen Crane, all Freemasons, exorbitantly wealthy capitalists, several Presidents – and also obscure preachers, grafting local officials and feeble poetasters.

    We cannot recapture whatever charm it was in Bierce made contemporaries tolerate, relish and even love the great 'curmudgeon.' Suffice it to point out, as brief accounts of his life tend not to, that he was an extraordinarily handsome man. He was tall and stood very straight, fit-seeming, though he had chronic asthma. His fair hair flourished, his moustache was magnificent. His eyes were clear blue and his complexion fresh and rosy despite his habitual excesses with strong drink. He dressed very stylishly indeed and was obsessively committed to personal hygiene, perhaps because he had spent the formative years of his life in the stench and filth of one of the nastiest conflicts in human history.

    He was born on 24 June 1842, in Meigs County, Ohio. He was the tenth child of Laura and Marcus 'Aurelius' Bierce. Father, an indigent farmer and devout Congregationalist puritan, descended, like Mother, from seventeenth-century settlers in New England, decided that each child's name should begin with A – Abigail, Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert – then Ambrose. But how had Marcus come by the melodramatic play by the English writer Jerrold – Ambrose Gwynett; or A Seaside Story (1828), which gave him a G to go with the infant's A?

    Further As followed – Arthur who died in 1846 aged nine months, then twin girls, Adelia and Aurelia, both dead within two years. Understanding of Ambrose surely has to begin with the fact that as his own understanding dawned, his mother was preoccupied firstly with caring for infants, secondly with mourning successive losses. Woman did not give Boy the love he needed. Rejecting Parents and Family, he took to books. Marcus was said to have the largest library in Kosciusko County, Indiana, where the family moved in 1846. Here Boy browsed.

    Ambrose was a loner, unhappy both at home and school. When he turned fifteen, he quit the homestead for good, at first working as a printer's 'devil' on the Abolitionist newspaper recently founded in the nearby town of Warsaw. Thence he gravitated to Akron, Ohio, where Marcus's very different younger brother Lucius was the most prominent local citizen – lawyer, published author, four times mayor, and military legend. In 1838, Canada had seethed with rebellion against British rule. 'General' Bierce had led a force of 500 volunteers across Lake Erie to stir things up. Now he was a fierce Abolitionist, who provided arms and ammunition for John Brown when the latter set off on his bloody sortie into the proslavery South.

    Lucius decided that Ambrose should be a soldier. He sent him, aged seventeen, to the celebrated Kentucky Military Institute. Ambrose dropped out after only one year, but acquired a military bearing and skills in design and cartography which quite soon became very useful indeed. For nine months, Ambrose drifted through menial jobs in Warsaw. Then in the spring of 1861, Civil War erupted. Bierce was one of the first to enlist in Lincoln's army.

    With the Ninth Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Bierce entered diurnal trauma. Twenty thousand British soldiers had died in the recent Crimean War, only 3,000 directly in combat. In the appalling Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, in which Bierce took part, there were 23,741 casualties. All his service was in the South. For a son of the flat Midwest, the mountainous terrain was breathtaking. Its beauty, with agonizing irony, was backdrop to scenes of futile heroism, nightmare butchery. Bierce saw hogs feeding on the corpses of dead soldiers, brains oozing out of shattered skulls. In a sense he had a 'good war'. His extreme bravery attracted attention early on, when he rescued a wounded comrade under Confederate fire. His Kentucky Institute year further marked him for promotion. In February 1862, already a sergeant, he was reassigned to General William B. Hazen's brigade in Buell's Army of the Ohio, and named topographical officer, surveying terrain. In a year, he rose to first lieutenant. By November 1864 he was brevet captain. Close to Staff, he observed with disgust the behavior of generals, some silly, others callous. His hero was Hazen, who suffered no folly gladly, whether in infantrymen or senior commanders.

    The future author of The Devil's Dictionary had inherited from his Puritan forebears a very strict conscience. Thus he was appalled by what he saw as a Federal treasury agent in Selma, Alabama after his demobilization. Carpetbaggers had moved in to loot the South. Bierce's job was to find and impound cotton deemed to belong to the US government. This was a commodity in immense demand, as important in its way as oil today. Fellow agents were in cahoots with conscienceless businessmen and outright pirates and smugglers. Bierce's stubborn probity put his life at risk. By now he had seen through the bombastic idealism of Uncle Lucius. What had the war really been about? From the careerism of soldiers to the cupidity of public servants, the war and its aftermath had helped provide Bierce, an affronted moralist, with the cynical view of human nature found in The Devil's Dictionary.

    Hazen rescued him with a call to join him in an inspection tour of forts in the newly created Mountain District in the West. Launched in July 1866, this was a risky but exhilarating jaunt, through Indian country where buffalo still roamed. Bierce arrived in San Francisco at the end of the expedition expecting to receive word that he had been commissioned as a captain in the US Army. The letter he now opened offered him the rank of second lieutenant. He was furious and decided to resign. So he found himself jobless in a booming city created within the last two decades by the famous Gold Rush. He would stay there, mostly, for over thirty years.

    At first he was employed as a watchman in the US Branch Mint, while he labored on his self education. He read the whole of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and this was crucial to the emergence of Bitter Bierce from the chrysalis of a wannabe peacetime soldier. Here Bierce read of a mighty republic fallen into chaos and doomed to erratic Caesarism, of virtuous rulers succeeded by vicious tyrants. Already alienated from his parents' chilly piety and disgusted by the revivalist meetings of rustic evangelists, he would find in Gibbon's ironic explorations of superstition, hypocrisy and corruption in the early Christian Church an intellectual dimension for his intestinal reactions. Not only the views but echoes of the style of the great master pervade Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, whenever it ventures into orotund Latinity.

    San Francisco was just the place to start as a writer. A population of around one hundred thousand supported towards ninety newspapers and journals of various kinds. Two cardinal

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