Willard Price
Willard DeMille Price (1887 – 1983) was a first and foremost a traveller, as well as journalist and author. During the course of his life, her circled the world three times, visiting 148 countries, documenting much of what he saw in his non-fiction travel books and his fictional Adventure series, where his two heroes travelled to many of the same locations as did Price.
Born in Ontario Canada, Price moved to Ohio in the United States when he was four, where he attended school and later the Western Reserve University. Upon graduation, Price spent a year preaching as an unordained Methodist pastor. He then travelled to New York and London, volunteering as a social worker. Upon his return to the United States, Price worked as publicity secretary of the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions, before becoming 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).
It is undoubtably his experiences that Price dragged upon when creating his popular Adventure series. The fourteen books document the adventures of Hal and Roger Hunt, two teenagers who travel the world collecting exotic animals with their father. Price commented that his aim in writing the Adventure series for young people was to lead them to read by making reading exciting and full of adventure. At the same time he wanted to inspire an interest in wild animals and their behaviour. For anyone who has read his books, they would agree that Price certainly managed to achieve that!