The dauntless spirit of Richard Halliburton
A sailor; a conqueror of the most treacherous mountain peaks; a man who wades defiantly under the stars of the Far East sky; a dashing writer who pursues his mark as a hunter on safari; an explorer who rides elephants through the Alps. This is not a collection of young men, newly emancipated by the end of the Great War and a new era of global empires. It is the nearly improbable life of one man, Richard Halliburton, whose swashbuckling existence was inspired by everyone from Daniel Defoe and Rupert Brooke to Odysseus. Halliburton was the self-proclaimed protagonist of his own heroic epic. He decided in the days before his graduation from Princeton in spring 1921 that he would forgo a life of tedious expectations and “let those who wish have their respectability.
