Agnes Newton Keith

A Californian who has followed her forester husband to the far corners of the earth, Agnes Newton Keith went as a bride to North Borneo, where she wrote the Atlantic Prize book LAND BELOW THE WIND. There in Sandakan she and her infant son, George, and her husband, Harry, were captured by the Japanese, and after three and a half years of prison camp she wrote her next great book, THREE CAME HOME.For the past decade the Keiths have been working for the United Nations in Libya, and what follows is an excerpt from Mrs. Keith’s new book, CHILDREN OF ALLAH,to be published by Atlantic-Little, Brown in February.

An American married to a British civil servant. AGNES NEWTON KEITH has spent twenty years of her maturity in the islands of the South Pacific. From 1934 until 1942 she and her husband made their headquarters in Sandakan, North Borneo, and from those years came her prize-winning Atlantic book, Land Below the Wind. Her great war book, Three Came Home, was the painful, compassionate account of her three years in a Japanese prison camp. When she and Harry had recovered their health, they returned to Asia as representatives of the U.N., and from their tour of duty in the Philippines has come the source material for her new and illuminating volume, Bare Feet in the Palace, of which this is an episode.

AGNES NEWTON KEITH, a graduate of the University of California, is happily married to Harry Keith, the Conservator of Forests and Wild Life in North Borneo. In the East she has lived three lives — first, as a young wife in Sandakan and in the jungle in the serene years before the war, a life described in her first book, Land Below the Wind: Then she suffered the degradation of the prison compound when for three and a half years she, her husband, and her young son George were captives of the Japs. Now restored to health, the Keiths are working for the reconstruction of North Borneo. This new and difficult phase she tells of in White Man Returns, an Atlantic-Little, Brown book to be published in mid-August.

AGNES NEWTON KEITH, a graduate of the University of California, first went to live in North Borneo as the bride of Harry Keith, an English zoologist who teas serving as Conservator of Forests and It Wild Life. Her happy adventures in the jungle and in Sandukan, the tiny capital, she described in her first book, Land Below the Wind, which won the Atlantic nonfiction prize of 1939. Mr. and Mrs. Keith and their young son George were taken prisoner by the Japanese, and four and a half years later, after convalescing from that experience, she wrote her second book. Three Came Home. The Keiths were called back to North Borneo directly after the war to assist in the reconstruction; in her forthcoming volume, While Man Returns, of which this is a chapter, Mrs. Keith tells of the third phase of their life in the hast.

A tall, slender Californian happily married to Harry Keith, the Conservator of Forests and Director of Agriculture of North Borneo, AGNES NEWTON KEITH is the author of two books: Land Below the Wind, which won the Atlantic Nonfiction Prize in 1939, and Three Came Home, the story of her captivity as a Japanese prisoner of war with her young son George. When Mrs. Keith returned to the States in 1946, she weighed eighty-seven pounds, her arm had been broken, her ribs kicked in. A year later, she and George went back to North Borneo to stand by Harry in the bitter toil of reconstruction.