H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925) was an English novelist best known for his influential adventure romances, including King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain, She, and the wider Allan Quatermain cycle. His fiction helped establish many of the patterns of the lost-world adventure story: remote landscapes, ancient mysteries, perilous journeys, hidden kingdoms, treasure, prophecy, and encounters with the unknown. Haggard's stories became central to late Victorian popular fiction and helped shape the later development of adventure novels, fantasy adventure, and pulp storytelling.Haggard drew on his experiences in southern Africa and on the imaginative possibilities of empire, archaeology, folklore, and romance to create fiction of unusual narrative force. His work remains important to readers interested in Victorian adventure fiction, classic fantasy, lost-race stories, early genre fiction, nineteenth-century British literature, and the origins of modern popular adventure. Allan Quatermain, his most famous male hero, became one of the enduring figures of adventure literature and a precursor to many later explorers, hunters, and treasure-seekers in popular fiction.
