Above: Richard Halliburton during his Guinness World Record-setting swim in the Panama Cannal. Photo courtesy of the Rhodes College Archives and Special Collections, Memphis, Tennessee.
Above: Richard Halliburton during his Guinness World Record-setting swim in the Panama Cannal. Photo courtesy of the Rhodes College Archives and Special Collections, Memphis, Tennessee.
The Forgotten Adventures of Richard Halliburton, From Tennessee to Timbuktu
Richard Halliburton ran away from his hometown in Memphis at the age of nineteen to lead an extraordinary and dramatic life of adventure. Against the backdrop of the Golden Age, the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, Halliburton’s exploits around the globe made him the most famous adventurer travel writer of his time.
January 18, 1928
“Of all the thrilling, fascinating, cute people—Richard Halliburton takes first place. Can you imagine golden, curly hair that won’t lie back straight like its owner combs it, great big snapping blue eyes, one of those thrilling low throaty voices and more pep than a barrel of monkeys—that’s he. Dick—who could ever call him Mr. Halliburton?—is in Dallas Wednesday and half the female population of the city was at the various bookstores he visited…He’s perfectly charming and witty and has a gift of repartee but—thank heavens—he doesn’t wisecrack.”
Mabel Duke
Dallas Texas Dispatch
April 20, 1928
“Halliburton is a poet who writes prose: a dreamer who lectures, a lover of gossamer sights and sounds, and strange, almost unearthly places. He is precisely the sort of poetical young man to take desk-chained, hum-drum ridden, work-a-day mortals for a brief spell out of their narrow niche in existence and to carry them whirling with him in a sort of fairy dance through the exotic places mankind has come to invest with the glamour of romance.”
Rodney Crowther
The Ashville Citizen
January 4, 1930
“Rudy Vallee, as a darling of lady patrons of pop arts, has a well-known rival in author Richard Halliburton, who recently visited Cleveland. Halliburton might seem to have an edge on Vallee. He doesn’t merely breathe romance in song. He is one who does things. And you know how men who do things appeal to us North Americans.”
Cleveland Press
February 16, 1924
“There probably is no human being in the world who can talk with the energy of Mr. Halliburton. He simply throws ‘er in high gear, opens wide the throttle and lets go and for 70 minutes last evening he talked without a comma, semi-colon or dash, in fact almost without taking a new breath.”
The Lowell Sun
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