CompareContrast An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born in 1842 into a fairly poor family as the youngest of nine children. He lived in a log cabin in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio as a child. The only formal education he ever received was a single year at the Kentucky Military Institute when he was seventeen years of age. He enlisted with the Ninth Indian Infantry as a drummer boy in the Civil War. Then, in 1864, he was wounded and left the war to live with one of his brothers in San Francisco. There he began his career as a newspaper writer and published his first short story, "The Haunted Valley," in the Overland Magazine in 1871. After marriage, Ambrose lived in London for five years. There he was accepted into the "Fleet Street Gang," a social Parthenon of prominent authors, critics, editors, and "pub-crawlers." After returning to the United States, he spent the year of 1880 gold mining and shotgun riding in the Black Hills of South Dakota for Wells Fargo & Company, but returned to his family in San Francisco. He became editor-in-chief of the weekly Wasp with the New Year's Day edition, 1881. He went on to write many more short stories, and his first collection, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, was published in 1891. In 1893, Can Such Things
Also in the original written tale Peyton looks back after falling into the water and freeing himself of the ties around his hands, feet, and neck and sees that one of the sentinels firing at him has grey eyes. There is no mention of the sentinel with grey eyes in the film. But from this point on the written and film versions are very similar if not exactly the same. In both accounts he dodges all of the bullets and makes it out of the water onto the sandy bank. He runs through the woods and ends up walking all night until he finally reaches his house. Just before he reaches his wife to embrace her, he is thrown back into reality and he swings by his neck from Owl Creek Bridge. Many short stories have been made into short films or movies over the years. The story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" was written in 1891 by Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce and later made into a short film, which was later aired by The Twilight Zone. There are many differences between the film and written accounts. But these differences are to be expected, especially in the time which this film was made, because some occurrences are more easily written than they are physically portrayed for a movie. But despite the differences, the general idea of the story created by Bierce is not lost in the film's account.
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Approximate Word count = 1003
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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