Bierce, Ambrose: Can Such Things Be? v1. 30 July 07
 

Here is a collection of 24 short stories by Ambrose Bierce. After stumbling onto An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (posted to this forum earlier), I figured that I might as well do a collection of some of his short stories.

Bierce wrote many supernatural stories that focused on the psychological aspects of horror, but his own story was pretty adventurous as well. In 1913, at the age of seventy-one, Bierce traveled (and promptly disappeared) into revolution-torn Mexico to fight alongside the bandit Pancho Villa. Although a popular theory is that Bierce argued with Villa over military strategy and was subsequently shot, he probably perished in the battle of Ojinaga on January 11, 1914. His body was never found so no one really knows what happened to him.

Note that in this collection, there's a story called Moxon's Master. Published in 1909, it's one of the first descriptions of a robot in English literature.