In an excellent essay on Ambrose Bierce in Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson wrote of how his experiences as a soldier left him with an “obsession with death” that found its way into everything he wrote. The new Library of America collection of Bierce’s writings—including his stories, reminiscences, war writings, and the Devil’s Dictionary—captures that obsession in all its monomania, though whether it will change what Mencken called the “occult, artificial drug-store flavor” that hovers over Bierce’s reputation is another matter.

Any fair assessment of Bierce’s work must revisit his war experiences. He enlisted in the Union Army six days after the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. On the second day of the Battle of Shiloh, his regiment came under unrelenting fire between Owl Creek and the Tennessee River. From this harrowing barrage he came away with his best-known story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Later, he was made a first lieutenant and transferred to the staff of General Hazen with whom he fought in the Battle of Chickamauga, in which Union troops suffered parlous defeat. Shelby Foote recounts the Army of the Tennessee celebrating their “first grand victory” with an outpouring of maenadic yelling. One survivor vividly described it as a “tremendous swell of heroic harmony that seemed almost to lift from their roots the great trees of the forest.”

In his story “Chickamauga,” Bierce recalled the battle from the standpoint of a deaf mute, who visits the battle after the Union defeat and