Richard Halliburton

American novelist and travel writer Richard Halliburton was born in Brownsville, TN, in 1900. His family moved to Memphis, TN, when he was an infant, and he grew up there. His parents sent him to the exclusive Lawrence Preparatory School in Lawrenceville, NJ, when he was 15. Graduating in 1917 he enrolled in Princeton University in Princeton, NJ. Leaving Princeton in 1918, he traveled to New Orleans, LA, signed up to be a crew member on a freighter and went to sea. He traveled around Europe and the US before returning to Princeton, from which he graduated in 1921. He wrote a book about his travels, called "The Royal Road to Romance", which was published in 1925. Both this book and his next one, "The Glorious Adventure"--about his adventures in Greece, where he climbed Mt. Olympus, followed the travels of Ulysses and swam the Hellespont--became best sellers, cementing his status as a prominent travel writer. He later journeyed to South America, Africa--he flew his own plane from Hollywood to Timbuktu, Mali--the Indian subcontinent (he climbed Mt. Everest) and southeast Asia. On March 4, 1939, he set out from Hong Kong, China, on a mission to sail a Chinese junk from there to San Francisco, CA. Three weeks later a passing ocean liner saw the ship about 1200 miles from Midway Island, in typhoon-racked seas with 40-foot-high waves. Neither Halliburton nor the ship were ever seen again. It is believed that it sank in the typhoon shortly after it was spotted by the liner. Halliburton was declared legally dead by a US court in October of that year.