With his reputation as a hard-hitting wordsmith, this statement was appropriate for an accomplished journalist in the employ of the William Randolph Hearst newspapers to make, although covers on a book written on his own adventures would indeed be rather far apart. From soldiering in the civil war to bandying about the old west as a journalist and macabre horror short story and novel writer, Bierce racked up adventures and controversy across the U.S.-Mexican and nineteenth-twentieth century boundaries. 

He was said to have quipped, “ An egotist is a person more interested in himself than in me.” Such rare displays of honesty go far in tempting one to investigate Mr. Bierce’s contributions to American literary history.