He wrote much poetry and, at eighteen, saw his first publication, a poem in the
National Review. At twenty he had written two novels, though both went unpublished.
In 1939 he entered the army; after serving in France, he was based in Egypt. In 1942 he was released to teach English literature at Fouad I University in Cairo, where he remained until 1946. "Living in Egypt, outside Europe and the Christian tradition," he has said, "was probably the best thing that could have happened to me as a writer"; in such a different society "you naturally find your imagination is very stimulated." In 1945 he married Joan Thompson--with whom he subsequently had two children--and, during the last month of that year, his first novel, A Journey to the Interior, was published. In 1946 he returned to England, settling permanently in Buckinghamshire, and began working as a free-lance writer.
Newby early recorded that the aim of his novels was "to show ordinary human relationships" through the use of the "traditional material of love and 'a-political' adventure." His "preoccupations," he later remarked, "have always been with what seems and what is," and for him "the most interesting problem is the relationship between innocence and knowledge." In A Journey to the Interior he handles these issues with considerable skill and reveals a distinctive mythic imagination.
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