The Lost Lexicographer:
Ambrose Bierce, Beelzebub, and Documentary Linguistics
Dee Villes and Dick Shunry
Published 2012.

Bitter Bierce, as the author of The Devil’s Dictionary was known to many, was not actually a satirist and horror fiction writer. Rather, he was a genuine lexicographer. Detailed literary analysis of The Devil’s Dictionary, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and The Necronomicon reveals that Bierce was, much like later author H.P. Lovecraft, actively engaging in linguistic documentation of certain Beelzebubbian dialects (or, perhaps the larger genus of Chthonic languages), including gathering folk tales for a linguistic anthropological anthology. Through the examination of philological and biographical evidence, the reader is led to this inescapable revelation, in a light-hearted romp through the historical underbelly of Bierce’s life and work.

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