King Solomon's Mines (1885) was the result of a wager in which H. Rider Haggard bet his brother three shillings that he could write an adventure novel at least half as good as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. The result is a book unique in the literature of the era for its combination of African setting, first person narrative, and an unadorned conversational style similar to that found in the aforementioned Treasure Island. Protagonist Allan Quatermain (the many prototype for Indiana Jones) comes across as a humble, common man who simply finds himself in the right place at the right time. As a pioneer of African adventure stories, Haggard is surprisingly sympathetic to African culture, portraying many natives as heroic and noble, while reserving for only the most brutal characters that contempt later authors would use in more blanket fashion to portray tribal Africans as a whole. The result is an easy-to-read, deeply popular tale which has inspired writers as diverse as Arthur Conan Doyle, H. P. Lovecraft, and Philip Jos Farmer. Features: Original Cover Art, Contextual Introduction, Annotations, and Study Questions.