King Solomon's Mines tells of a search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain for the missing brother of one of the party.

Written by Sir H. Rider Haggard, it  is the first English adventure novel set in Africa, and is considered to be the genesis of the Lost World literary genre.

Haggard had written the novel as a result of a five-shilling wager with his brother, namely whether he could write a novel half as good as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883).

He wrote it in a short time, somewhere between six and sixteen weeks between January and 21 April 1885.

However, because the book is a complete novelty, it is rejected by one publisher after another.

When, after six months, King Solomon's Mines finally is published, the book becomes the year's best seller; the only problem (much to the chagrin of those who had rejected the manuscript) is how to print copies fast enough.

The book is first published in September 1885 amid considerable fanfare, with billboards and posters around London announcing "The Most Amazing Book Ever Written".

By the late nineteenth century, explorers are uncovering ancient civilizations around the world, such as Egypt's Valley of the Kings, and the empire of Assyria.

Inner Africa remains largely unexplored and King Solomon's Mines, the first novel of African adventure published in English, captures the public's imagination.

In the process, King Solomon's Mines creates a new genre, known as the "Lost World", which will inspire Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King and HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.

Lee Falk's The Phantom will initially be written in this genre.

A much later Lost World novel is Michael Crichton's Congo, which involves a quest for King Solomon's lost mines, supposedly located in a lost African city called Zinj.