Bierce

������’s more, it turns out that the occultist’s inner circle included Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Dashiell Hammett and, most important, the Weird Tales author Clark Ashton Smith.

Yet it was Sterling who gained the patronage of the famous writer Ambrose Bierce, Sterling who was named the poet laureate of San Francisco.

Locklin described this version of himself in a poem as “a starving Ambrose Bierce or some long-suffering, taller brother of Edgar Allan Poe.”

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography,” wrote Ambrose Bierce, whose bitter insights were shaped in large part by a terrible war.

So, contrary to Ambrose Bierce's take from a century ago, people don't need to be wealthy or male to be philanthropists.