14 Facts About Willard Price

Willard DeMille Price was a Canadian-born American traveller, journalist and author.

Willard Price attended East High School and Western Reserve University where he funded his college degree by writing advertisements for local businesses and newspapers.

On graduating in 1909, Willard Price confounded expectations by choosing not to enter a seminary, instead spending a year preaching as an unordained pastor.

Willard Price then resolved to experience the "workaday world", a decision that took him to New York and then London.

Willard Price worked as publicity secretary of the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions, completed his thesis on immigration and edited the journals Survey and World Outlook.

Willard Price spent his later life as a "foreign correspondent and roving researcher" on behalf of newspapers, magazines, museums and societies.

Willard Price visited a total of 148 countries and circled the globe three times before his death.

Willard Price documented these adventures in a series of adult non-fiction books, beginning with Rip Tide in the Southern Seas.

Willard Price's early writing career focused in particular on Japan, where he lived from 1933 to 1938 and could see first-hand the country's militarization.

In 1999, Professor Laurie Barber of New Zealand's Waikato University suggested that Willard Price may have spied for the United States.

Indeed, Willard Price admits to having done so in My Own Life of Adventure, one of two autobiographies he wrote in his later years.

Willard Price's travels provided inspiration for his popular Adventure series of novels for young readers, in which teenage zoologists Hal and Roger Hunt travel the world capturing wild animals.

In 2006, the Willard Price family sold the copyrights and related legal rights for the fourteen Adventure series titles, plus the right to use Willard Price's name, to London-based Fleming Literary Management for an undisclosed six-figure sum.

Willard Price later married Mary Selden, who would accompany him on many of his travels throughout the world.