William G. Stevenson

A century prior to the War Between the States, a German magazine writer, pseudo-scientist and notorious swindler, Rudolf Erich Raspe, penned a series of fictional articles describing the fantastic adventures of a military character he called Baron Münchhausen.  In 1785, a book of Raspe’s collected stories was published in England under the title Baron Munchausen’s Narratives of His Marvelous Travels…