Carl Oglesby (nonfiction): Difference between revisions

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'''Carl Oglesby''' (July 30, 1935 – September 13, 2011) was an American [[Writer (nonfiction)|writer]], academic, and political activist.


New Left writer and lecturer Carl Oglesby, who was brought to Antioch College by students for six months in 1966–67 as “activist scholar-in-residence” and later taught in the literature department, died September 13 at his home in New Jersey.
== Biography ==


As visiting assistant professor of literature, the former president of Students for a Democratic Society (SPS) offered a course in The Political Novel and gave a tutorial on Modern Political Drama.
Oglesby enrolled at Kent State University for three years before dropping out to attempt to make his way as an actor and playwright in Greenwich Village, a traditionally bohemian neighborhood in New York City. While at Kent State, he married Beth Rimanoczy, a graduate student in the English department; they ultimately had three children (Aron, Caleb and Shay).


In deciding to appoint Oglesby, who held only a B.A., literature department chairman Dr. Robert Maurer said, “Credentialism wasn’t important. I’ve heard Oglesby lecture and he’s brilliant.”
After a year in New York, he returned to Akron, where he became a copywriter for Goodyear and continued working on his creative endeavors, including three plays influenced by Britain's "angry young men" literary movement (exemplified by "a well-received work on the Hatfield-McCoy feud") and an unfinished novel.


While at Antioch as “activist scholar”—a post students designed “to bring someone from where the action is to campus for meaningful dialogue”—he co-authored Containment and Change. Of Oglesby’s contribution to the volume, a New York Times book reviewer wrote: “Oglesby’s 168-page essay has the effect of a grenade exploding unexpectedly inches before your eyes—it is the closest that the activist, non-programatic [sic] New Left has come to producing a manifesto.”
In 1958, Ogelsby and his family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he took a technical writing position with the Bendix Corporation, a defense contractor. He ascended to the directorship of the company's technical writing division before completing his undergraduate degree as a part-time student at the University of Michigan (where he cultivated a circle of friends that included Donald Hall and Frithjof Bergmann) in 1962.


A native of Akron, Ohio, Oglesby attended Kent State University and the University of Michigan from which he received a Bachelor’s in literature in 1962. He was manager of Bendix Systems Division’s technical publications department before becoming involved in SDS and serving as its president from 1965-66.
Oglesby first came into contact with members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Ann Arbor in 1964.


His memoir, Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement, was published in 2008.
He left Bendix in 1965 and became a full-time Research, Information, Publications (RIP) worker for SDS.


http://magazine.antiochcollege.org/fall-2011/alumni-profiles
He was the President of the leftist student organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from 1965 to 1966.
 
Oglesby's political outlook was more eclectic than that of many in SDS. He was heavily influenced by libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, and dismissed socialism as “a way to bury social problems under a federal bureaucracy."
 
In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[11] Also in 1968, he was asked by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver to serve as his running mate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in that year's presidential election (he declined the offer).
 
Oglesby was forced out of SDS in 1969, after more left-wing members accused him of "being 'trapped in our early, bourgeois stage' and for not progressing into 'a Marxist-Leninist perspective.'"
 
Oglesby moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he founded the Assassination Information Bureau, an organization that has been credited with bringing about the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations. He wrote several books on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the various competing theories that attempt to explain it. According to Oglesby, Kennedy was killed by "a rightist conspiracy formed out of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the Syndicate, and a Cowboy oligarchy, supported by renegade CIA and FBI agents."
 
He recorded two albums, roughly in the folk-rock genre, one titled "Going To Damascus."
 
He taught politics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College.
 
He attended the April 2006 North-Eastern Regional Conference of the "new SDS" and where he gave a speech in which he said that activism is about "teaching yourself how to do what you don't know how to do."
 
Oglesby died of lung cancer at his home in Montclair, New Jersey on September 13, 2011, aged 76.
 
== Nonfiction cross-reference ==
 
* [[Assassination of John F. Kennedy (nonfiction)]]
 
== Fiction cross-reference ==
 
== External links ==
 
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Oglesby Carl Oglesby] @ Wikipedia
* [http://magazine.antiochcollege.org/fall-2011/alumni-profiles Alumni profiles] @ Antioch College
 
 
[[Category:Nonfiction (nonfiction)]]
[[Category:Assassination of John F. Kennedy (nonfiction)]]
[[Category:People (nonfiction)]]
[[Category:Writers (nonfiction)]]

Latest revision as of 08:26, 23 August 2020

Carl Oglesby (July 30, 1935 – September 13, 2011) was an American writer, academic, and political activist.

Biography

Oglesby enrolled at Kent State University for three years before dropping out to attempt to make his way as an actor and playwright in Greenwich Village, a traditionally bohemian neighborhood in New York City. While at Kent State, he married Beth Rimanoczy, a graduate student in the English department; they ultimately had three children (Aron, Caleb and Shay).

After a year in New York, he returned to Akron, where he became a copywriter for Goodyear and continued working on his creative endeavors, including three plays influenced by Britain's "angry young men" literary movement (exemplified by "a well-received work on the Hatfield-McCoy feud") and an unfinished novel.

In 1958, Ogelsby and his family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he took a technical writing position with the Bendix Corporation, a defense contractor. He ascended to the directorship of the company's technical writing division before completing his undergraduate degree as a part-time student at the University of Michigan (where he cultivated a circle of friends that included Donald Hall and Frithjof Bergmann) in 1962.

Oglesby first came into contact with members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Ann Arbor in 1964.

He left Bendix in 1965 and became a full-time Research, Information, Publications (RIP) worker for SDS.

He was the President of the leftist student organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from 1965 to 1966.

Oglesby's political outlook was more eclectic than that of many in SDS. He was heavily influenced by libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, and dismissed socialism as “a way to bury social problems under a federal bureaucracy."

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[11] Also in 1968, he was asked by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver to serve as his running mate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in that year's presidential election (he declined the offer).

Oglesby was forced out of SDS in 1969, after more left-wing members accused him of "being 'trapped in our early, bourgeois stage' and for not progressing into 'a Marxist-Leninist perspective.'"

Oglesby moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he founded the Assassination Information Bureau, an organization that has been credited with bringing about the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations. He wrote several books on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the various competing theories that attempt to explain it. According to Oglesby, Kennedy was killed by "a rightist conspiracy formed out of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the Syndicate, and a Cowboy oligarchy, supported by renegade CIA and FBI agents."

He recorded two albums, roughly in the folk-rock genre, one titled "Going To Damascus."

He taught politics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College.

He attended the April 2006 North-Eastern Regional Conference of the "new SDS" and where he gave a speech in which he said that activism is about "teaching yourself how to do what you don't know how to do."

Oglesby died of lung cancer at his home in Montclair, New Jersey on September 13, 2011, aged 76.

Nonfiction cross-reference

Fiction cross-reference

External links

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