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
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