UGA Press: Unabridged Devil's Dictionary • Bierce et al.


Books>		Detailed Book Information

$19.95

Tax-exempt?
Read this before you buy.

The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
Ambrose Bierce
Edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi

The authoritative edition of Ambrose Bierce's hilarious masterpiece

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.

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 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.

March 2002

ISBN 0820324019 paper • $19.95

440 pp. • 6 x 9 in.

"This is a work of genuninely impressive scholarship and will undoubtedly become the authoritative text for Bierce's Devil's Dictionary."
—Thomas V. Quirk, Professor of English, University of Missouri-Columbia

"This carefully edited manuscript will add immeasurably to Bierce studies."
—Joseph B. McCullough, Distinguished Professor of English, University of Nevada-Las Vegas

"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

"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 of The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary will be a delight."
—Michael L. Hall, Sewanee Review

"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

books features news & events how to order information home site map