Richard Halliburton was born in Brownsville, Tennessee, on January 9, 1900, the son of Wesley and Nell Halliburton, and moved to Memphis at an early age while returning to Brownsville many times to visit family and friends. He graduated from Princeton in 1921 and set out on a world tour that led to his first book, The Royal Road to Romance, which sold over 100,000 copies in its first few months. He also wrote many magazine and newspaper articles and lectured about his trips and adventures, addressing some 3,000,000 people in 14 years. He was lost at sea in 1939, and his writing touched many lives around the world.