H. Rider Haggard

Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) was an English novelist and the inventor of the lost-world adventure story. The son of a Norfolk squire, he went to South Africa at nineteen on the staff of the governor of Natal, witnessed the annexation of the Transvaal and the Zulu war and returned to England to read for the bar. King Solomon's Mines, written in 1885 on a bet that he could match Treasure Island, made him famous; She, Allan Quatermain and Nada the Lily followed, and he wrote more than fifty novels in all. He also served on royal commissions on agriculture and emigration and was knighted for that work in 1912.