Richard Halliburton

Richard Halliburton was an American traveler, adventurer, and author. Halliburton’s exploits made headline news throughout his brief career. He swam the length of the Panama Canal, scaled Mount Fuji and the Matterhorn, and plunged into the depths of the Mayan Well of Death. At age 39, he disappeared during his final adventure, an attempt to sail a small Chinese ship named the Sea Dragon across the Pacific Ocean, and was never seen again, cementing his status as a legendary adventurer.

Halliburton’s first book, The Royal Road to Romance (1925), became a bestseller. Two years later, he wrote The Glorious Adventure (1927), which retraced Ulysses’ adventures throughout the Classical Greek world as recounted in Homer’s The Odyssey (c. 8th century BCE), and which included his visiting the grave of English poet Rupert Brooke on the island of Skyros. In 1929, Halliburton published New Worlds To Conquer, which recounted his famous swim across the Panama Canal which and retraced Cortez’s conquest of Mexico.^[1]

Halliburton’s friends included movie stars, writers, intellectuals, musicians, artists, and politicians, including writers Gertrude Atherton and Kathleen Norris, Senator James Phelan, philanthropist Noël Sullivan, and actors Ramón Novarro and Rod LaRoque.

Halliburton never married. While he dated several women in his youth, and expressed intense affection for several, Halliburton’s most lasting relationship was with the journalist Paul Mooney, with whom he often lived and worked.