Agnes Newton Keith (b. 1901)

Abstract

The American wife of a British agriculturalist working in Borneo, Keith was imprisoned with her two-year-old son, George, after the Japanese occupied the island. Three Came Home, her account of the years she spent in a Japanese prison camp, was published in 1946, the year after her release. Keith had previously published a book about Borneo, Land Beneath the Wind, which had been popular in its Japanese translation and which earned her the regard and occasional protection of the American-educated Colonel Suga, Commandant of Internees in Borneo. Keith returned to Borneo after the war and continued her literary career.