Scott Thomas Anderson January 27, 2021Updated: January 31, 2021, 7:06 pm
Ambrose Bierce was a San Francisco journalist in the late 19th century. His “The Devil’s Dictionary” codified the template for a satirical dictionary. Photo: Bancroft Library
On a summer night in 1870, Ambrose Bierce began a newspaper column about a corpse discovered in an alley of Chinatown.
“The body was found partially concealed under a paving-stone which imbedded in the head,” he jotted for the San Francisco News Letter. “A crowbar was driven through the abdomen and one arm was riven from its socket by some great convulsion of nature.”
Writing with a human skull on his desk, Bierce ended the report with, “it is supposed he came to his death by heart disease.”