If we could only put aside our civil pose and say what we really thought, the world would be a lot like the one alluded to in The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary. There, a bore is ""a person who talks when you wish him to listen,"" and happiness is ""an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another."" This is the most comprehensive, authoritative edition ever of Ambrose Bierce's satiric masterpiece. It renders obsolete all other versions that have appeared in the book's ninety-year history. 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 Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth. This new edition is based on David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi's exhaustive investigation into the book's writing and publishing history. All of Bierce's known satiric definitions are here, including previously uncollected, unpublished, and alternative entries. Definitions dropped from previous editions have been restored while nearly two hundred wrongly attributed to Bierce have been excised. For dedicated Bierce readers, an introduction and notes are also included. Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary is a classic that stands alongside the best work of satirists such as Twain, Mencken, and Thurber. This unabridged edition will be celebrated by humor fans and word lovers everywhere.

Ambrose Bierce is well known to readers as the author of "The Devil's Dictionary" (1906) and numerous short stories, such as the Civil War tales gathered in "Tales of Soldiers and Civilians" (1891) and the horror stories collected in "Can Such Things Be?" (1893). But, in his own day, he was best known as a prolific and fearless jounalist, and in the 40 years of his literary career he wrote thousands of articles for newspapers and magazines in San Francisco, London, and elsewhere. Most of the articles and poems that Bierce published in his own 12-volume "Collected Works" (1909-12) first appeared in his newspaper columns, as did his celebrated tales. With the growing scholarly interest in Bierce, these contributions are eliciting more attention.

This bibliography is the first to attempt an exhaustive catalog of Bierce's entire body of published work. While the volume includes a chapter of separate publications by Bierce, such as individual books, its most important feature is a chapter listing entries for his contributions to books and periodicals. These entries identify the first appearances of his stories, articles, and poems. An additional chapter lists reprints of his works, and the volume also provides information about manuscript holdings. Joshi and Schultz demonstrate that in addition to being a master short story writer, fabulist, and epigrammatist, Bierce may also have been the leading American journalist of the 19th century.

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is commonly regarded as the leading author of supernatural fiction in the 20th century. He is distinctive among writers in having a tremendous popular following as well as a considerable and increasing academic reputation as a writer of substance and significance. This encyclopedia is an exhaustive guide to many aspects of Lovecraft's life and work, codifying the detailed research on Lovecraft conducted by many scholars over the past three decades. It includes hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries on Lovecraft and presents extensive bibliographical information.

The volume draws upon rare documents, including thousands of unpublished letters, in presenting plot synopses of Lovecraft's major works, descriptions of characters in his tales, capsule biographies of his major colleagues and family members, and entries on little known features in his stories, such as his imaginary book of occult lore, the "Necronomicon." The volume refers to current scholarship on the issues in question and also supplies the literary, topographical, and biographical sources for key elements in Lovecraft's work. As Lovecraft's renown continues to ascend in the 21st century, this encyclopedia will be essential to an understanding of his life and writings.