Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines

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Best-selling author of colonial adventure fiction, H. Rider Haggard employs a triumvirate of individualist heroes for his most famous novel,

King Solomon’s Mines

(1885): Durban-based hunter and trader Allan Quatermain, country squire Sir Henry Curtis, and retired naval-officer Captain John Good.

Supposedly written following a bet with his brother that he could not equal Treasure Island (Monsman, 11; see also Foden), Haggard’s story opens with the latter two men approaching the book’s first-person narrator Quatermain to help them find Curtis’s lost brother, who has gone missing while searching for the eponymous diamond mines. Though he has always doubted its authenticity, Quatermain has a sixteenth-century blood-drawn map on a torn patch of clothing that purports to disclose a route

2560 words

Citation: Childs, Peter. "King Solomon's Mines". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 January 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=9801, accessed 28 March 2024.]

9801 King Solomon's Mines 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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