Alone among important American writers, Ambrose Bierce fought for four years in the Civil War. The writings he produced about that conflict comprise a body of work unique in American literature. This volume gathers virtually everything Bierce wrote about the war.

“Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period is a superior work, for it includes not only all of Bierce's short fiction and nonfiction about the Civil War but a detailed 25-page introduction that is invaluable in placing Bierce in historical context and thus helping to explain his stance as a realist about the war and a satirist about post-Civil War American self-congratulation and heroic myth-making. Duncan and Klooster wisely organize Bierce's myriad stories, memoirs, letters, newspaper columns, and even war poems around the war's five-year duration.”—Library Journal

“Here is exemplary American prose, and here is the real war—without uplift, without virtue, without purpose.”—Benjamin Schwarz

“Bierce writes with great strength and never hides from us the ugliness of war.”—William S. McFeely

“This book makes a highly significant contribution to American literary studies.”—Michael W. Schaefer, author of Just What War Is: The Civil War Writings of De Forest and Bierce