Life
Ogburn was the son of lawyer Charlton Greenwood Ogburn and writer Dorothy Ogburn née Stevens and the nephew of the sociologist William Fielding Ogburn. He was raised in Savannah and New York, graduated from Harvard in 1932 and wrote and worked in publishing. During World War II he joined military intelligence, leaving with the rank of captain. He returned to the US to begin a career with the State Department. He married Vera M. Weidman in 1951.
After the success of his story "Merrill's Marauders", a Harper's Magazine cover story in 1957, Harper & Bros. offered an advance for a book and he quit the government to write full-time in 1957.
He was among the first State Department officials to explicitly oppose the growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war.
Ogburn's papers are archived at Emory College.
Read more about this topic: Charlton Ogburn
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearing—it being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)
“she bit the towel and called on God
and I saw her life stretch out . . .
I saw her torn in childbirth,
and I saw her, at that moment,
in her own death and I knew that she
knew.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above these heights, new peaks will rise.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)