The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

by Ambrose Bierce

Overview

A virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary offers some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Ambrose Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth.
This is the most extensively annotated edition of a work by Bierce ever published, and the first edition of The Devil's Dictionary to provide detailed bibliographical information on every entry. It will be celebrated by wits and word lovers everywhere.
First time in paperback.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789874587
Publisher:	Pantianos Classics
Publication date:	01/01/1906
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.43(d)

About the Author

AMBROSE BIERCE (1842–1914?) was one of nineteenth-century America’s most renowned satirists. The author of short stories, essays, fables, poems, and sketches, he was a popular columnist and wrote for several San Francisco and London newspapers during his forty-year journalism career.

DAVID E. SCHULTZ is a technical editor. He is coeditor, with S. T. Joshi, of both A Sole Survivor, a collection of Ambrose Bierce's autobiographical writings, and Lord of a Visible World, an autobiography-in-letters of H. P. Lovecraft.

S. T. JOSHI is a freelance writer and editor. He is the editor of The Collected Fables of Ambrose Bierce and author of H. P. Lovecraft: A Life.

Ambrose Bierce (Author)
AMBROSE BIERCE (1842–1914?) was one of nineteenth-century America’s most renowned satirists. The author of short stories, essays, fables, poems, and sketches, he was a popular columnist and wrote for several San Francisco and London newspapers during his forty-year journalism career.

David E. Schultz (Editor)
DAVID E. SCHULTZ is a technical editor. He is coeditor, with S. T. Joshi, of both A Sole Survivor, a collection of Ambrose Bierce's autobiographical writings, and Lord of a Visible World, an autobiography-in-letters of H. P. Lovecraft.

S. T. Joshi (Editor)
S. T. JOSHI is a freelance writer and editor. He is the editor of The Collected Fables of Ambrose Bierce and author of H. P. Lovecraft: A Life.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
List of Abbreviations
The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
Appendix
Notes
List of Appearances of Definitions
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary incorporates an informative appendix, a set of notes, a list of the first ovvurences of definitions, a bibliography and a comprehensive index. However, it is to the compiler's own text that the reader's attention should gravitate.
—Times Literary Supplement

Peter Reading

This is a work of genuinely impressive scholarship and will undoubtedly become the authoritative text for Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary.

University of Missouri-Columbia - Thomas V. Quirk

A compilation of all of Bierce's satirical definitions published over a forty-year period, this latest version of the Dictionary ('A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic') merits a wide readership both within and without the Academy ('A modern school where football is taught').

American Literary Review

Splendidly produced.

London Times Literary Supplement

Most readers and biographers have agreed with Schultz and Joshi that The Devil's Dictionary is 'quintessential Bierce.' For the serious student of Bierce's diabolical lexicon, their beautiful new edition . . . will be a delight.

Sewanee Review

Bierce was America's first realist writer, but, unlike realism's later practitioners, he knew something about reality—it's really funny.

P. J. O'Rourke

This carefully edited manuscript will add immeasurably to Bierce studies.

University of Nevada-Las Vegas - Joseph B. McCullough