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Augustus Caesar Buell (September 4, 1847 – May 23, 1904) was an American author who wrote several biographies of great Americans, following the success of a book about his experiences in the Civil War. Most material in these biographies that was not plagiarized was (as was discovered too late for many subsequent scholars) fabricated. In 1876 he was briefly arrested following an accusation of libel. ==Biography== Buell's own statements about his life and ancestry are not to be trusted. From his claims to have ancestors who were personally acquainted with the subjects of his biographies, down to the simple thanks he gave to the Library of Congress (which, according to the visitors' log, he never entered) he told the stories his audience wanted to hear. He was born in 1847, and raised in New York, he is known to have enlisted in Company L of the 20th New York Cavalry, on August 21, 1863. He was promoted to corporal three months later, but demoted again the following April, and he left the service in July 1865. He later claimed to have risen to the rank of colonel. For some years he lived in New York State, but his literary career began some time after he had moved to Philadelphia, to work for the major shipbuilding and engineering firm of William Cramp & Sons. In his Civil War memoir, "The Cannoneer", published in 1890, he vividly described his experiences at the Battle of Gettysburg, but that battle took place in July 1863, seven weeks before he enlisted, and two essays by Silas Felton reveal much of the hollow truth behind Buell's claims. He later claimed that a visit to St. Petersburg in Russia on behalf of Cramp's, a few years later, enabled him to find important material for his first biographical project, the life of John Paul Jones. The major demolition job on that work we owe to the far superior scholarship of Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, who devoted an appendix to Buell's lies about Jones in his own Pulitzer-winning biography. The work of scholars like Morison, which should never have been necessary, reveals the full depth of Buell's fraud. Had he simply introduced false stories without citing any source document, there would have been less of a problem, but he went one step further, and invented entire letters and journals, from which he published extracts in the book. He died in 1904, and is buried at the Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Augustus Caesar Buell」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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