By the early 1930s America had one literary treasure that risked his life to please its readers. Richard Halliburton had already become a best-selling travel author and could have retired comfortably on the immense wealth gained from the sale of his first two books. Yet some men are born to dare, and Halliburton was one these. New Worlds to Conquer was Halliburton's third book and contains a knapsack full of that adventurer's gold - dreams brought to reality by the alchemy of his courage and daring. The book details how Halliburton set off for Latin America in search of adventure, and find it he did. He dived to the bottom of the Mayan Well of Death, from which hundreds of skeletons had been dredged, then swam fifty miles down the length of the Panama Canal. Not content, he climbed to the crest of Mexico's lofty Mount Popocatepetl, twice, and roamed over the infamous Devil s Island. Yet his most amazing adventure occurred when he had himself marooned on the same island which had once held Robinson Crusoe captive. "Somewhere a lizard stirred the leaves ... Furtively I looked about me, realizing that in the darkness the boa-constrictors would be abroad creeping forth from the ancient tombs and slinking down the leafy avenues," Halliburton wrote. This is Halliburton at is best - fatalistic about his own safety, poetic about his chances of survival, and determined to bring home a hair-raising tale of adventure from the Latin lands of legend.

Some men lead lives of such rare intensity that they disappear into the mists of their own legend. Such a man was Richard Halliburton - Dreamer -Traveler - Poet - Bon Vivant and doomed to die. Seven League Boots was his fifth and last book, and details his epic adventures in a variety of remote places. "I had been commissioned to go anywhere in the world I wished and write whatever pleased me. My only orders were to move fast, visit strange places, to meet whomever was interesting - and to start at once," Halliburton wrote. His subsequent book illustrates how he followed these orders with passion and abandon. America's favorite adventure writer dined with Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, interviewed the infamous assassin of Czar Nicholas II in Russia, tried to sneak into the forbidden city of Mecca, and finally, rode an elephant over the Alps in the tracks of Hannibal. It is Halliburton at his best, reckless and romantic, and it is the last chapter of a life grown tragic. Incapable of writing a dull page, Halliburton nevertheless was a captive of his own press. His insatiable readers demanded ever more death-defying accounts. Nearing forty, physically exhausted, and in financial trouble, Halliburton thought to roll the dice once again, hoping that the charm which had always saved him in the past would materialize one more time. It didn't Soon after finishing this book, the intrepid traveler ignored the warnings of seasoned sailors and set sail on the ship that would take him away from his book-hungry public and into the arms of a watery death. This, his final book, is the ink-stained headstone of Halliburton's amazing life.

It was perhaps inevitable that Richard Halliburton, such a romantic, imaginative wanderer, would follow in the footsteps of another legendary traveller - Odysseus. Halliburton's second book, The Glorious Adventure describes his journey through the Mediterranean in the shadow of his mythical hero. In Greece, Halliburton charged Mount Olympus 'in order to visit the gods that dwelled there'; he swam the Hellespont as Byron had before him and journeyed on to Troy, where Odysseus's long adventure began. He sailed to Stromboli in the Tyrrhenian Sea, home of Aeolus god of the winds; then to the Bay of Naples, Circeo - 'island' of Circe - and Li Galli, the siren isles that shimmered off the Amalfi coast. Battling through the Straits of Messina, Odysseus's Scylla and Charybdis, he explored Sicily and Corfu before setting out for the shores of Ithaca, long-forgotten home for one, the end of an adventure for another. As epic and eventful as The Odyssey itself and one of the most captivating travel books of the 20th century, The Glorious Adventure evokes the romance of another time, when heroes and gods walked the earth.