Parallels between Poe's The House of Usher and Bierce's Beyond the Wall, Poe's The Black Cat and Bierce's The Funeral of John Mortonson, and in Poe's MS Found in a Bottle and Bierce's Three and One are One. When you decide to become an author, you can't help but be influenced by your predecessors, causing some of your work to reflect and echo that of your predecessor. This is the case between Ambrose Bierce and his predecessor, Edgar Allen Poe. Aside from the obvious fact that both Poe and Bierce's tales display a fascination with death in its many forms, depictions of mental deterioration, supernatural occurrences, and ghostly manifestations, there are other similarities and parallels. Examples of them appear in Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" and in Bierce's short story "Beyond the Wall", Poe's "The Black Cat" and Bierce's "The Funeral of John Mortonson", and in "MS Found in a Bottle" by Poe and "Three and one are one" by Bierce. Beyond the Wall vs. The Fall of the House of Usher In "Beyond the Wall", the descriptions of the setting, the words used by Bierce, and the way the story opens are reminiscent of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" . In both stories the narrator goes to the home of a childhood friend whom the man has not seen for many years. The narrator begins his journey "...a whole dull, dark and silent day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the sky...". Poe creates the feeling of despair by writing about how “an unbearable sadness pervaded my spirit” when the narrator saw “the melancholy House of Usher.” He looked at "...the simple landscape features of the domain - the dingy walls -... some thriving sedges - and some white rotten trunks... half of paper... ..n stories; then what's the use?" Bierce was able to hold his own in almost all the stories he had written with the masters, such as Mark Twain, Brett Harte and, of course, Edgar Allen Poe. BibliographyAmbrose Bierce, The complete short stories of Ambrose Bierce. University of Nebraska Press, 1984.Dedria Bryfonski, "Ambrose Bierce." Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, Volume One. Gale Research Company. New York, 1978. Cathy N. Davidson, Critical Essays on Ambrose Bierce. GK Hall & Co. Boston, Massachusetts. 1982. Arthur Miller, “The Influence of Edgar Allen Poe on Ambrose Bierce.” American literature. Volume four. May 1932. pp 130-150.Edgar Allen Poe, Edgar Allen Poe: Eight Tales of Terror. Scholastic Magazine, Inc. New York, 1978. Edgar Allen Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories. New American Library. New York, 1972