Richard Halliburton (January 9, 1900 – presumed dead after March 24, 1939) was an American travel writer and adventurer who, among numerous journeys, swam the length of the Panama Canal and paid the lowest toll in its history, 36 cents, in 1928. He disappeared at sea while attempting to sail the Chinese junk Sea Dragon across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California.
Richard Halliburton was born in Brownsville, Tennessee, to Wesley Halliburton, a civil engineer and real estate speculator, and Nelle Nance Halliburton. A brother, Wesley Jr., was born in 1903. The family moved to Memphis, where the brothers, who were not close, spent their childhood. Richard attended Memphis University School, where his favorite subjects were geography and history; he also showed promise as a violinist, and was a fair golfer and tennis player. In 1915, he developed a rapid heartbeat and spent some four months in bed before its symptoms were relieved. This included some time at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, run by the eccentric and innovative John Harvey Kellogg, whose philosophy of care featured regular exercise, sound nutrition, and frequent enemas. In 1917, following an apparent bout of rheumatic fever, Wesley Jr., thought strong and in fine health, suddenly died.
At 5 ft 7 in (170 cm) and about 140 pounds (64 kg), Halliburton was never robust but would seldom complain of sickness or poor stamina. He graduated from the Lawrenceville School in 1917, where he was chief editor of The Lawrence. In 1921, he graduated from Princeton University, where he was on the editorial board of The Daily Princetonian and chief editor of The Princetonian Pictorial Magazine. He also attended courses in public speaking and considered a career as a lecturer.
Leaving college temporarily during 1919, Halliburton became an ordinary seaman and boarded the freighter Octorara that July, bound from New Orleans to England. He toured historic places in London and Paris, but soon returned to Princeton in early 1920 to finish his schooling. His trip inspired in him a lust for even more travel; seizing the day became his credo. The words of Oscar Wilde, who in works like The Picture of Dorian Gray enjoined experiencing the moment before it vanished, inspired Halliburton to reject marriage, family, a regular job, and conventional respectability as the obvious steps after graduation. He liked bachelorhood, youthful adventure, and the thrill of the unknown. To earn a living he intended to write about his adventures. He dedicated his first book to his Princeton roommates, "...whose sanity, consistency and respectability... drove [him] to this book".
Halliburton's father advised him to get the wanderlust out of his system, return to Memphis and adjust his life to "an even tenor" which for son Richard meant the humdrum, prosaic and dreary encased in a set routine:
"I hate that expression", Richard responded, expressing the view that distinguished his life-style, "and as far as I am able I intend to avoid that condition. When impulse and spontaneity fail to make my way uneven then I shall sit up nights inventing means of making my life as conglomerate and vivid as possible.... And when my time comes to die, I'll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain and thrills—any emotion that any human ever had—and I'll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed.
He believed that his fortunes lay abroad, not at home: One's youth should not be wasted in idle domestic pursuits—nor in fulfilling expectations enjoined by others or by societal norms. Becoming a keynote of his philosophy was that young adults see the world beyond the horizon before they settle down into a set routine unbeknownst to the many choices in life a greater knowledge of that wider world offers.
Witness to the wedding of the emperor of China
In 1922, Halliburton witnessed the last ceremonial marriage of a Chinese Emperor, the wedding of Emperor Puyi to Empress Wanrong in Beijing. The Royal Family would be permanently expelled less than two years later. Halliburton wrote of the event in his memoir:
At four in the morning this gorgeous spectacle moved through the moonlit streets of Peking en-route to the prison-palace. The entire city was awake and the people thronged the line of march. A forest of pennants blazed and fluttered past...gold dragons on black silk, blue dragons on gold silk; and swaying lanterns, and gilded kiosques containing the bride’s ceremonial robes, and princes on horseback surrounded by their colorful retinues. There was more than enough music. Last of all came the bride’s sedan hung with yellow brocade, roofed with a great gold dragon, and borne along by sixteen noblemen. I followed close behind the shrouded chair, and wondered about the state of mind of the little girl inside. Headed straight for prison, she was on the point of surrendering forever the freedom she had hitherto enjoyed... The procession wound its way to the 'Gate of Propitious Destiny,' one of the entrances to the palace, and halted before it. Torches flared. There was subdued confusion and whispers. Mandarins and court officials hurried back and forth. Slowly, darkly, the great gates swung open,—I could look inside the courtyard and see the blazing avenue of lamps down which the procession would move up to the throne room where the emperor waited. Into the glitter and glamour of this 'Great Within' the trembling little girl, hidden in her flowered box, was carried. Then as I watched, the gates boomed shut and the princess became an empress.
Lecturer and pioneer of adventure journalism
While Halliburton was attending Princeton, Field and Stream magazine paid him $150 for an article (equivalent to $2,410 in 2025). This initial success encouraged him to choose travel writing as a career. His fortunes changed when a representative of the Feakins Agency heard him deliver a talk, and soon Halliburton was given bookings for lectures. Despite a high-pitched voice and occasional discomfort on the details, Halliburton displayed such enthusiasm and recounted such vivid recreations of his often bizarre foreign encounters that he became popular with audiences. On the strength of his lecturing and increasing celebrity appeal, publisher Bobbs-Merrill, whose editor-in-chief David Laurance Chambers was also a Princeton graduate, accepted Halliburton's first book, The Royal Road to Romance (1925), which became a bestseller.
Two years later, Halliburton published The Glorious Adventure, which retraced Ulysses' adventures throughout the Classical Greek world as recounted in Homer's Odyssey, and 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 swimming of the Panama Canal—in August 1928 he spent 10 days swimming approximately 47 miles (76 km) over a period of 50 hours in the water, during which he was protected from alligators and other dangers by an Army sharpshooter in a nearby rowboat, and paid a toll of just 36 cents ($6.75 in 2025), which was based on his tonnage of
The book also covered other journeys, including retracing the track of Hernán Cortés' conquest of Mexico, and his enactment of the role of Robinson Crusoe as a "cast away" on the island of Tobago in the Caribbean, donning a full goat-skin costume as had been worn by Alexander Selkirk when he was marooned in the South Pacific Ocean in the early 18th century. Animals figure prominently in this and many other of Halliburton's adventures.
Halliburton's friends during this time included movie stars, writers, musicians, painters, and politicians, including writers Gertrude Atherton and Kathleen Norris, Senator James Phelan, philanthropist Noël Sullivan, and actors Ramón Novarro and Rod La Rocque. Casual acquaintances were many, as lectures, personal appearances (notably to promote India Speaks), syndicated columns, and radio broadcasts made him a household name associated with romantic travel.