This was in 1874. Two years earlier, under his journalistic pseudonym of "Dod Grile," he had published his first books two small volumes, largely made up of his articles in the San Francisco
News Letter, called The Fiend's Delight, and Nuggets And Dust Panned Out In California. Now, he used the same pseudonym on the title-page of a third volume, Cobwebs from an Empty Skull. The Cobwebs were selections from his work in Fun satirical tales and fables, often inspired by weird old woodcuts given him by the editors with the request that he write something to fit. His journalistic associates praised these volumes liberally, and a more distinguished admirer was Gladstone, who, discovering the Cobwebs in a second-hand bookshop, voiced his delight in their cleverness, and by his praise gave a certain currency to Bierce's name among the London elect. But despite so distinguished a sponsor, the books remained generally unknown.
Congenial tasks and association with the brilliant journalists of the day did not prevent Bierce from being undeniably hard up at times. In 1876 he returned to San Francisco, where he remained for twenty-one years, save for a brief but eventful career as general manager of a mining company near Deadwood, South Dakota. All this time he got his living by writing special articles for the Wasp, a weekly whose general temper may be accurately surmised from its name, and, beginning in 1886, for the Examiner, in which he conducted every Sunday on the editorial page a department to which he gave the title he had used for a similar column in The Lantern Prattle. A partial explanation of a mode of feeling and a choice of themes which Bierce developed more and more, ultimately to the practical exclusion of all others, is to be found in the particular phase through which California journalism was just then passing.
In the evolution of the comic spirit the lowest stage, that of delight in inflicting pain on others, is clearly manifest in savages, small boys, and early American journalism. It was exhibited in all parts of America Mark Twain gives a vivid example in his Journalistic Wild Oats of what it was in Tennessee but with particular intensity in San Francisco. As a community, San Francisco exalted personal courage, directness of encounter, straight and effective shooting. The social group was so small and so homogeneous that any news of importance would be well known before it could be reported, set up in type, printed, and circulated. It was isolated by so great distances from the rest of the world that for years no pretense was made of furnishing adequate news from the outside. So the newspapers came to rely on other sorts of interest. They were pamphlets for the dissemination of the opinions of the groups controlling them, and weapons for doing battle, if need be, for those opinions. And there was abundant occasion: municipal affairs were corrupt, courts weak or venal, or both. Editors and readers enjoyed a good fight; they also wanted humorous entertainment; they happily combined the two. In the creative dawn of 1847 when the foundations of the journalistic earth were laid and those two morning stars, the
Californian of Monterey and the California Star of San Francisco, sang together, we find the editors attacking the community generally, and each other particularly, with the utmost ferocity, laying about them right and left with verbal broad-axes, crow-bars, and such other weapons as might be immediately at hand. The California Star's introduction to the public of what would, in our less direct day, be known as its "esteemed contemporary" is typical:
"We have received two late numbers of the Californian, a dim, dirty little paper printed in Monterey on the worn-out materials of one of the old California WAR PRESSES. It is published and edited by Walter Colton and Robert Semple, the one a WHINING SYCOPHANT, and the other an OVER-GROWN LICK-SPITTLE. At the top of one of the papers we find the words 'please exchange.' This would be considered in almost any other country a bare-faced attempt to swindle us. We should consider it so now were it not for the peculiar situation of our country which induces us to do a great deal for others in order for them to do us a little good We have concluded to give our paper to them this year, so as to afford them some insight into the manner in which a Republican newspaper should be conducted. They appear now to be awfully verdant."Down through the seventies and eighties the tradition persisted, newspapers being bought and read, as a historian of journalism asserts, not so much for news as to see who was getting "lambasted" that day. It is not strange, then, that journals of redoubtable pugnacity were popular, or that editors favored writers who were likely to excel in the gladiatorial style. It is significant that public praise first came to Bierce through his articles in the caustic , widely read on the Pacific Coast during the seventies. Once launched in this line, he became locally famous for his fierce and witty articles in the