An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a short story by American author Ambrose Bierce. Originally published by the The San Francisco Examiner in 1890, it was first collected in Bierce's 1891 book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. The story, which is set during the Civil War, is famous for its irregular time sequence and twist ending. It is Bierce's most anthologized story.

Read more about An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge:  Plot Summary, Stories With Similar Structure, Adaptations, Influence

Famous quotes containing the words occurrence, owl, creek and/or bridge:

    One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

    The little owl flew through the night,
    As if the people in the air
    Were frightened and he frightened them,
    By being there....
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    The only law was that enforced by the Creek Lighthorsemen and the U.S. deputy marshals who paid rare and brief visits; or the “two volumes of common law” that every man carried strapped to his thighs.
    State of Oklahoma, U.S. relief program (1935-1943)

    Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it’s intimate and psychological—resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
    Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)