Charlton Ogburn
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Charlton Ogburn, Jr. (15 March 1911 - 19 October 1998) was an author and freelance professional writer. He was the author of over a dozen books and numerous magazine articles. The Marauders (1959), his first person account of the Burma Campaign in World War II, may be his best-known work; it was later made into the film Merrill's Marauders (1962). His account of his travels along the largely deserted north eastern shore in The Winter Beach is considered a classic of nature-writing.[citation needed]
Born in Atlanta, the son of lawyer Charlton Ogburn and writer Dorothy Ogburn, he was raised in Savannah and New York. He graduated from Harvard in 1932 and wrote and worked in publishing. During WWII he joined military intelligence, leaving with the rank of captain. He returned to the US to begin a career with the State Department. After the success of his story The White Falcon (1955) he quit the government to write full-time in 1957. He married Vera M. Weidman in 1951.
Ogburn is, however, probably most well known for several books and articles on the Shakespeare authorship question, the last and most influential of which, The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Man and the Myth,(1984) led directly to the making of a 1987 Frontline documentary on the authorship question, narrated by Al Austin, and a 1987 Moot court case on the authorship question sponsored by American University which over a thousand members of the public attended. Three supreme court justices -- John Paul Stevens, Harry Blackmun, and William J. Brennan -- heard arguments in favor of the orthodox view of Shakespearean authorship and the Oxfordian theory attributing the works to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604).
Although the justices held in favor of the traditional account of authorship, Stevens later authored an influential article, The Shakespeare Canon of Statutory Construction, in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (1991), supporting Ogburn's position. Indirectly Ogburn's book inspired a succession of influential articles in The New Yorker (1988), Atlantic Monthly (1991), and Harpers Magazine (1999) and stimulated a reinvigoration of the Oxfordian theory.[citation needed]
[edit] Apocryphal quotation
The following quotation, or variants of it, is frequently misattributed to Petronius. The quotation actually is by Charlton Ogburn, Jr.
- We trained hard ... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
Ogburn authored this in an article published by Harper's Magazine in 1957. This recounts his experiences as a junior officer in the famous World War II U.S. Army unit known as Merrill's Marauders, and the quoted passage refers to his somewhat chaotic early training. In full, it reads as follows:
- We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organising, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
[edit] Bibliography
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