H. Rider Haggard

Henry Rider Haggard was an English novelist who invented the lost-world adventure and, with it, a template that ran through the whole of twentieth-century popular fiction. Sent to Natal at nineteen as secretary to the governor, he spent six years in southern Africa, was present at the annexation of the Transvaal, and returned to England with a landscape and a set of obsessions he would write out for the next forty years. King Solomon's Mines was written in six weeks on a wager that he could better Treasure Island, and it made him famous overnight. She followed, and sold in the tens of millions. What lifts the best of Haggard above the adventure shelf is that the wonder is never quite comfortable: his ruined cities and immortal queens carry a persistent sense that the civilization doing the discovering may be the smaller thing. He spent his later life on agriculture and rural reform, served on royal commissions, and was knighted for public service rather than for fiction, a distinction he seems to have preferred.