In 1912, the acknowledged master of the exotic adventure tale was H. Rider Haggard, whose novels are still widely read today. His King Solomon's Mines (1885) most closely resembles The Lost World. In it, adventurer Allan Quatermain leads an expedition into the African wilderness to find ancient treasure.

It and The Lost World are part of a well -defined literary subgenre sometimes called "boys' books" because they supposedly show how to become men.

Conan Doyle's book has been often imitated, most notably by Edgar Rice Burroughs in The Land That Time Forgot (1924), a collection of three novellas about the land of Caspak in which evolution has taken a course independent of the rest of the world.