Ambrose Bierce: References & Edit History

• 9 Mysterious Disappearances of People Other Than Amelia Earhart

  / Ambrose Bierce
• body snatching
• conservatism
• The Devil’s Dictionary
• An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
• short story

  / The impressionist story

The source of Ambrose Bierce’s full name is known, to a greater or lesser degree, but the spelling of his middle name—rendered most often as Gwinnett or Gwinett—is not.

Bierce’s name is derived from the play Ambrose Gwinett; or, A Sea-Side Story: A Melo-Drama in Three Acts by the English dramatist Douglas Jerrold. Published in 1828 and widely popular in Great Britain and the United States, it tells the story of a man wrongfully accused of murder. This spelling—Gwinett—is by far the most common among library records of this text, but there exist at least two records that render the title as Ambrose Gwinnett. This spelling—Gwinnett—can, in turn, be found in various biographical works about Jerrold, from an essay in the reference series Dictionary of Literary Biography (vol. 344) to a biography of Jerrold published in 2002 by the scholar Michael Slater.

This same inconsistency is replicated in biographical materials about Bierce. Robert A. Wiggins, Richard O’Connor, and Carey McWilliams render Bierce’s middle name as Gwinett in their biographies. Mary E. Grenander and Walter Neale use Gwinnett. Roy Morris, Jr., is coy: he uses both Gwinett (but only as part of the title of Jerrold’s play) and Gwinnett (but only in an imagined inscription on an equally imagined tombstone). Adolphe de Castro introduces a third variant spelling: Gwinnet. According to de Castro,

In his application for a pension Bierce laconically stated that there was no public record of his birth, but that in baptism he received the name of Ambrose Gwinnet. In retelling the matter, he said that he had earnestly tried to live down his baptism, and that he had dropped the Gwinnet part of his name for so long that the memory of man runneth not counter.

Secondary materials not focused solely on biography tend to abjure Gwinnet and instead make use of Gwinnett or Gwinett. An Ambrose Bierce Companion (2001), for instance, prefers Gwinnett. Stanford University’s Guide to the Ambrose Bierce Papers, 1872–1913 (1997) uses Gwinett. Penn State University’s online Ambrose Bierce Project deploys Gwinnett.

What evidence did Bierce himself leave? Little, if any: Bierce seems to have not used his middle name in full when signing letters or other materials. In his passport application, in 1872, he used only “Ambrose G. Bierce.”

Bierce’s definition of the word truth in his The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) may provide a hint about the manner in which he might have considered any effort to definitively render his middle name: truth is “[a]n ingenious compound,” he explains, “of desirability and appearance.”