An Unfinished Race
short story by Ambrose Bierce
"An Unfinished Race" is a short story by American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer Ambrose Bierce. The story, dealing with a mysterious disappearance of a man, was first published in The San Francisco Examiner on October 14, 1888, and was included in Bierce's collection Can Such Things Be? (1893). Bierce himself mysteriously disappeared in October 1914.
"An Unfinished Race" was collected in the third volume of Bierce's complete works, which included the ghost stories from his earlier book Can Such Things Be? The updated version included three new stories under the heading "Mysterious Disappearances", including "The Unfinished Race".
Summary
The three-paragraph story is set in 1873. James Worson, a shoemaker who lived in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, undertook a bet, while under the influence of liquor. The bet stated that he could run non-stop from Leamington Spa to Coventry, then back again, a distance of over 40 mi (64 km) (in reality, the full distance is approximately 22 mi (35 km)). He started to run, accompanied by the unnamed receiver of the bet, a linen draper named Barham Wise and a photographer named Hamerson Burns, who followed him in a wagon.
“An Unfinished Race” enters the record as short story by Ambrose Bierce. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Unfinished, Race and short can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“An Unfinished Race” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Unfinished, Race and short provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2583883. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1888, 1893, 1914 and 1873.
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This entry incorporates text from “An Unfinished Race” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.