H. Rider Haggard | 1856-1925 An often repeated anecdote has it that King Solomon's Mines was written on a bet: H. Rider Haggard claimed, and his brother doubted, that he could write a better and more successful adventure story than Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Hence King Solomon's Mines was written, published, and became a phenomenon in 1885. Born into the large family of a country gentleman, Haggard was a colonial administrator in South Africa during the Zulu War of 1879 and the first Boer War of 1880. He drew on his experience in Africa to write King Solomon's Mines, a story, like Treasure Island, of maps, buried treasure, villainy, and English pluck. In South Africa, Haggard developed an appreciation for African cultures and rituals. While such appreciation is evident in King Solomon's Mines and its 1887 sequel, Allan Quatermain, also apparent is Haggard's subscription to Victorian ideas of European superiority (Haggard's other well-known novel is She, published in 1886, about the 2,000-year-old white queen of an African civilization). Following the pattern of a traditional quest narrative, in which the young hero sets out on his own to fulfill the demands of himself, his family, and/or his country, but narrated by the middle-aged protagonist Quatermain, the two romances turn the British Empire into an adventure for sons and fathers alike. In so doing, Haggard combined the adult historical fiction of Sir Walter Scott with the boys' historical fiction of G.A. Henty and Stevenson. Haggard traveled extensively through the Empire and beyond and wrote energetically, almost until his death in 1925. On a trip to America, he met and befriended President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1919 Haggard was created a Knight Commander of the British Empire, in recognition of the public administrative work he continued to do even as a famous and well-rewarded author. Haggard returned to Africa in his writing dozens of times, publishing several novels, volumes of history, and even agricultural reports about the continent he made vivid in the English imagination through the adventures of Allan Quatermain.