Willard Price

Willard DeMille Price (28 July 1887 – 14 October 1983) was a Canadian-born American traveller, journalist and author.

Early life Price was born to a family of devout Methodists in Peterborough, Ontario. He was the nephew of Weston A. Price. When he was four years old, his father took him canoeing and fishing on Stony Lake, near his home town; he later described this as his "first great adventure." He spent some time living on his grandfather's farm before moving to Cleveland, Ohio. Price attended East High School and Western Reserve University where he funded his college degree by writing advertisements for local businesses and newspapers. During this time, he became a young Methodist leader and developed a taste for adventure on long trips during vacations.

Early career

On graduating in 1909, Price confounded expectations by choosing not to enter a seminary, instead spending a year preaching as an unordained pastor. He then resolved to experience the "workaday world", a decision that took him to New York and then London. In Southwark, he developed a "painfully acute social awareness" while volunteering at a settlement house. This inspired Price to become "a social worker with a pen".

Returning to New York in 1911, Price won a scholarship to the School of Philanthropy at Columbia University, where he acquired a MA and Litt.D. While there he wrote a number of campaigning newspaper and magazine articles including a first-hand account of the squalid conditions aboard a transatlantic liner, a survey of Newark's slums and an investigation of child labour conditions in a Pittsburgh iron and steel plant (with Herschel V. Jones). Price also worked as publicity secretary of the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions, completed his thesis on immigration and edited the journals Survey and World Outlook.

Travel and writing Price spent his later life as a "foreign correspondent and roving researcher" on behalf of newspapers, magazines, museums and societies (in particular the National Geographic Society and the American Museum of Natural History). He visited a total of 148 countries and circled the globe three times before his death.

Price documented these adventures in a series of adult non-fiction books, beginning with Rip Tide in the Southern Seas (1936). His 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 Price may have spied for the United States. Indeed, Price admits to having done so in My Own Life of Adventure, one of two autobiographies he wrote in his later years. What remains unclear is whether Price was on the payroll of military intelligence.

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

Personal life Price married Eugenia Reeve in 1914. They had one son. Eugenia died in 1928. Price later married Mary Selden, who would accompany him on many of his travels throughout the world.