Description
A professor is entreated by a dying colleague to take custody of the colleague’s five-year old son, raise him to adulthood, and at that time pass on a chest to him. The professor does so, and when the child reaches adulthood and the chest is revealed, it leads them on an adventure to Africa. There they encounter a young queen of a lost race who says she’s over two thousand years old, with an equally startling claim about the young man.
H. Rider Haggard invented the “lost world” genre of fiction with King Solomon’s Mines, and he continued the theme, adding in a bit of romance, in She. Haggard wrote the book in six months “in a white heat,” and handed the manuscript to his agent with the remark, “There is what I shall be remembered by.” Haggard was right: with its setting in darkest Africa and a woman at its center described as the most beautiful in the world, She was a sensation at its release, has never been out of print, and has sold upwards of 100 million copies.
Description
King Solomon’s Mines was published in September 1885, becoming an immediate best seller by tapping into people’s excitement for the unknown: in this case, the unexplored regions of Africa.
Haggard wrote the novel in a very short period, between six and sixteen months, on a bet with his brother to try to match Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. In the process he created a new literary genre known as the “Lost World” genre, which would later influence other writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft.
The book tells the tale of Allan Quatermain, an adventurer and hunter, who is approached by Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good to help them find Curtis’ lost brother, who went missing while trying to find the fabled King Solomon’s Mines.
This book has spawned multiple adaptations in the form of movies, comics, and TV shows.