Paul Mooney

Paul Mooney (November 4, 1904 – presumed dead after March 24, 1939) was a freelance journalist and photojournalist today best known for his collaborative work with adventurer and travel writer Richard Halliburton. Early life Born in Washington, D.C., on November 4, 1904, Mooney was the son of Ione Lee Gaut Mooney (died 1955), an important figure in the Daughters of the American Revolution, and James Mooney, an ethnologist for the Smithsonian Institution and an expert on American Indian lore such as the Ghost Dance. In 1923 or 1924, Mooney boarded a freighter bound for Salonika and Constantinople. The Ottoman Empire had recently collapsed and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was emerging as the leader of the secular Republic of Turkey. Returning to the United States, Mooney considered school at Catholic University before seeking his fortune in New York City where he wrote advertising copy for a travel agency. In 1927, he published "Seven Poems" verses which, according to his biographer Gerry Max, "speak of adventure, unrequited love, triumphant love, carnal love, death and burial." The following year he lived briefly in Paris; he also sojourned in a community in Brittany, and visited Berlin, Germany. Attractive, fun-loving and personally engaging, Mooney, though aloof by nature and often temperamental, made friends easily; these included, besides the artists Leslie Powell and Don Forbes, writer and raconteur Eugene MacCown (who, besides a famous portrait of shipping heiress Nancy Cunard, painted a portrait of Paul), and possibly writer René Crevel. Like his father an ardent Irish patriot, he sought out writer James Joyce and others of the expatriate Irish community living in Paris.