H. Rider Haggard

Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) was born in Bradenham, Norfolk, and went out to South Africa at nineteen on the staff of the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal, witnessing the British annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 and later farming ostriches there before returning to England to study law. King Solomon's Mines (1885), reportedly written on a wager with his brother that he could not write a novel as good as Treasure Island, was an immediate sensation and established the "lost world" adventure novel as a genre; She (1887) and Allan Quatermain (1887) followed, and Haggard returned to the character of Allan Quatermain across some eighteen further books over the next four decades. Away from fiction he wrote extensively on agriculture and rural welfare, served on royal commissions on land settlement and coastal erosion, and was knighted in 1912 for this public service. He died in London at sixty-eight.