# An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

**Author:** Ambrose Bierce
**Tags:** Short stories, Prisoners, United States
**Price:** Free
**Formats:** DOCX, EPUB, FB2, PDF, TXT
**Downloads:** 42
**Added:** 10.07.2026
**URL:** https://samolit.com/books/95844

## Description

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is Ambrose Bierce's haunting masterpiece of Civil War fiction, first published in 1890 and later collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. The story opens on a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, where a Confederate sympathizer named Peyton Farquhar stands bound and noosed, moments from execution by Union soldiers for attempting to sabotage the crossing. As the plank gives way beneath him, the narrative plunges into a desperate, breathless bid for survival, tracing his fall into the churning water below and his frantic escape through gunfire, forest, and open country toward the arms of his waiting wife. Told with hallucinatory precision and mounting suspense, Bierce's prose blurs the line between reality and the mind's last desperate inventions, building toward one of American literature's most devastating twist endings. Spare, psychologically penetrating, and unflinching in its portrayal of violence and self-deception, this brief tale remains a landmark of short fiction, showing how war strips away illusion and confronts even the most resourceful man with an inescapable truth.