The Letters of Ambrose Bierce by Ambrose Bierce

Though from boyhood a lover of tales of the terrible, it was not until my twenty-second year that I heard of Ambrose Bierce, I having then been for ten months a resident of Oakland, California. But in the fall of the year 1891 my friend Roosevelt Johnson, newly arrived from our town of birth, Sag Harbor, New York, asked me if I were acquainted with his work, adding that he had been told that Bierce was the author of stories not inferior in awesomeness to the most terrible of Poe's.

We made inquiry and found that Bierce had for several years been writing columns of critical comment, satirically named "Prattle", for the editorial page of the Sunday "EXAMINER", of San Francisco. As my uncle, of whose household I had been for nearly a year a member, did not subscribe to that journal, I had unfortunately overlooked these weekly contributions to the wit and sanity of our western literature -- an omission for which we partially consoled ourselves by subsequently reading with great eagerness each installment of "Prattle" as it appeared. But, so far as his short stories were concerned, we had to content ourselves with the assurance of a neighbor that "they'd scare an owl off a tombstone."