With one of the most beautiful titles in all of literature, A Horseman in the Sky is a short story by Ambrose Bierce, a Civil War veteran, journalist and author of The Devil's Dictionary, which was named one of the 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. It was first published in the San Francisco Examiner in April 1889, but later re-appeared in a revised form, in Bierce's anthology, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians.
A Horseman in the Sky focuses on the way in which a single family can be destroyed by war, and that this destruction extends further than the family members who are physically involved in actively fighting in it. In the story, a father and a son find themselves taking different sides in the Revolutionary War and this leads to the son killing his father in the name of the Union. After this murder, he young man, Carter Druse, goes slowly mad, unable to cope with having chosen patriotism over love for his father.
The issue of veteran mental health was very important to Bierce; as a soldier he had sustained a serious head injury which affected his mental health for the rest of his life.
Bierce had a strong attachment to the story and felt that it was one of the best he had ever written. This was perhaps because it included more of his own experiences and detailed events that he had actually witnessed first hand, than some of his other stories did, which made him more personally and emotionally invested in it. As a story it was also thematically similar to a number of his other works, and one of the several that included a plot based around the killing of a father by a child. Some critics pondered his frequent obsessional use of patricide in his work.
Although Bierce became famous for his short-story writing, and was a leading journalist in his day, he was also highly regarded as a horror writer and mentioned in the same literary breath as Poe. He was very influential and Ernest Hemingway listed Bierce as one of his biggest influences.
Bierce's life became mired in mystery and rumor swirled about a possible untimely demise. On a trip to Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1913, during the Mexican Revolution, Bierce disappeared. He was thought to be on the move with rebel troops and was never seen alive again. Although there were no official reports of his death, word-of-mouth at the time claimed that he was executed by firing squad in Sierra Moada, and buried in an un-marked grave at the local cemetery.
