A man of diverse talents and a writer eager to try his skills at many different kinds of writing projects, both nonfiction and fiction, H. Rider Haggard is best remembered by general readers of fantasy for his fourth and fifth books, King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She: A History of Adventure (1886), action adventures in which something long hidden is found: in one, a lost treasure; in the other, a veiled woman of incredible power and beauty awaiting the reincarnation of the one love of her long lifetime amid the ruins of a lost civilization that had ceased to be even before the flourishing of the civilization of ancient Egypt. The continued popularity of these works alone would secure Haggard a place in reference books dedicated to fantasy and science fiction. Yet these works were just the start of his lucrative thirty-nine-year writing career, which includes his development of further adventures for the main characters of King Solomon's Mines and She, his exploration of historical fantasies, his other lost-race adventures, his look at the last survivors of Atlantis, and a kind of time travel through dreams of past lives.
