Richard Halliburton 1900-1939

In his day Richard Halliburton’s celebrity rivaled that of Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. His exploits, done with distinctive flair, were headline news. “Thrilling, magnificent, astounding” were words used by the press to describe his many exploits. Famous people from the past often guided his footsteps, providing his itineraries with romantic themes: among them were Alexander the Great, Hannibal, King Richard the Lion-Hearted, Hernando Cortez, Sir Francis Drake, Lord Byron and Lawrence of Arabia. With only Homer’s Odyssey to guide him, he traced Ulysses’ stormy, eventful course from fabled Troy to his home in Ithaca. He ran the original marathon, rode on an elephant over the Alps, lived among the inmates of Devil’s Island in French Guiana – later among the French Foreign Legionnaires in North Africa, lived on Robinson Crusoe’s Island in the manner of the famed castaway, searched for King Solomon’s mines, climbed Mt. Fuji (in winter), descended the Mayan Well of Death, flew around the world in an open cockpit airplane, and interviewed (as the first Westerner to do so) the self-declared assassin of the Czar.

A popular lecturer, Halliburton brought the world to reported millions. Once The Royal Road to Romance established his literary stardom in 1925, he continued with the bestsellers The Glorious Adventure (1927), New Worlds To Conquer (1929), The Flying Carpet (1932), and Seven League Boots (1935). Long out-of-print, these classics of the genre have recently been reissued to evoke, once again, far distant lands and foreign peoples.

Besides having an immense adult following, by the late 1930s Halliburton had achieved recognition as the most widely read author in America by young people. His two Book of Marvels, though written expressly for children, invited readers of all ages to travel with him to the world’s most storied places, and along the way introduced them to the pleasures of history, geography and literature. In simply unfolded, lively narrative, coupled with stunning photography, the Marvels books, as enduring as the Arabian Nights and Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, have continued to stir the imagination and inform. Updated and reformatted for today’s youth, the republication of these ageless fixtures of Twentieth Century children’s literature remains a principal aim of our team.

Throughout his career, Halliburton acted as a sort of cultural ambassador for American freedom and free enterprise. In the last decade of his life, he joined with others to put California among the leading cultural centers of both America and the world. Besides numerous stage, screen and concert acquaintances, his friends, and consultants, included novelist and writers rights advocate Gertrude Atherton (hailed California’s “First Lady of Letters”) as well as Senator James Phelan at whose home at Villa Montalvo, near Saratoga, he was a frequent visitor. As a guest of Noel Sullivan, the leading authority on California’s monasteries, he vacationed at the famous Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio. He also knew literary editor for the San Francisco Chronicle Joseph Henry Jackson who edited Continent’s End, an early collection of vanguard California writing. Leading advocate of trans-Pacific aviation, and promoter of stronger ties between China and America, Dr. Margaret Chung was another friend. In Laguna Beach, the Halliburton house, a glass-and-concrete structure perched on top of a mountain ridge overlooking the Pacific, still stands as one of the modernist marvels of southern California architecture.