Richard Halliburton - Lecturer and Pioneer of Adventure Journalism

Lecturer and Pioneer of Adventure Journalism

While Halliburton was attending Princeton, Field and Stream magazine paid him $150 for an article he submitted. This initial success encouraged him to choose travel and travel writing as a career. His first ventures abroad provided the basis for a book, but attempts at publication of the resulting manuscript were unsuccessful, as ten publishers rejected it as puerile and too purple in its prose. His fortunes changed when a representative of the Feakins Agency heard him deliver a talk, and soon Halliburton was given bookings for lucrative lectures. Despite a high-pitched voice and occasional discomfort on the dais, Halliburton displayed such enthusiasm and recounted such vivid recreations of his often bizarre foreign encounters, drawn from a repertoire of seven or so 'hit' escapades, that he became a delight to audiences young and old. 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 his first book, The Royal Road to Romance (1925).