Margaret Landon

Margaret Landon (1903–1993) was an American author best known for her bestselling novel Anna and the King of Siam, which inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I. After graduating from Wheaton College in Illinois in 1925, she married Kenneth Landon, a seminary student, and worked briefly as a schoolteacher. In 1927, Landon and her husband volunteered to serve as Presbyterian missionaries in Siam (present-day Thailand), where she learned of Anna Leonowens, the nineteenth-century governess and tutor to the royal family of Siam. Landon’s novel based on Leonowens’s life has sold over one million copies and been translated into more than twenty languages.