Richard Halliburton is an American adventurer.
By profession and for his day-to-day expenses, he is a travel writer who bankrolled his impressive excursions all over the globe by writing both poetically and practically about the regions he visited, the peoples he encountered, and the dangers he undertook - all in a way that was informative and highly entertaining to readership back in the States. At times he supplemented both his income and his reputation by working in the journalist field as well as on the lecture tour.
This quite handsome man with a glib tongue and smooth, easy-going style was definitely a hit both behind a lectern and out on yet another excursion. Standing a modest 5'7 and weighing only 140 lbs., Halliburton nevertheless achieved a much larger persona by never hesitating to travel to new places to try new things, always with an eye to excitement and anything that would allow him to avoid what his father recommended for him - "an even tenor".
"I hate that expression", he was quoted as saying, "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."
Much of his adventures are recorded for posterity in the journals he published over time about these escapades, the first of which started when in 1919 at the age of 19 he chose to take a break from college to work as a common seaman aboard a freighter heading to England. A year later he would return to finish his degree at Princeton before again heading out into the, for him, yet unexplored.
The adventures we have recorded of Halliburton are those he chose not to make public during his life, deeds done on behalf of U.S. Army Intelligence who saw in this young adventurer someone who was willing to go to exotic places on their behalf - or having already arrived at such places still agreed to do little jobs for them.