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Charlton Ogburn, Jr. (15 March 1911, Atlanta, Georgia - 19 October 1998, Beaufort, South Carolina) 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.

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. 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. He was among the first State Department officials to explicitly oppose the growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war.

Ogburn is, however, probably most well known for several books and articles on the Shakespeare authorship question, continuing the passion of his parents, who had written several books on the topic, including This Star of England (1952). Ogburn Jr's last and most influential book, 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.

Ogburn's book also 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.

Ogburn's papers are archived at Emory College..

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Charlton Ogburn", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0