Jules Verne

Life

Jules Verne was born in 1828 in Nantes, a port on the Loire, the eldest son of a lawyer. He was sent to Paris to study law and qualified, but he spent his time in the theater and in libraries, writing plays and short pieces and reading science and travel literature. He supported himself for a time as a stockbroker while continuing to write.

In 1862 he met the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who accepted his novel Five Weeks in a Balloon and signed him to a long-term contract. The arrangement produced the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of more than fifty novels intended to combine adventure with accurate geography and science. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), and Michael Strogoff (1876) were among the most successful. Hetzel edited Verne closely and sometimes insisted on changes, including softening the politics of Captain Nemo.

Verne married in 1857, settled in Amiens in 1871, and served on its town council. He owned a series of yachts and traveled in Europe and once to the United States, but he spent most of his life at his desk. In 1886 he was shot in the leg by a mentally ill nephew and walked with a limp afterward. He died in Amiens in 1905.

Literary significance

Verne is, by most counts, among the most translated authors in the world, and he shares with H. G. Wells the credit for founding science fiction. His particular contribution was to make plausible technology the engine of adventure: the submarine, the space capsule, the balloon, and the railway timetable. In France he was long dismissed as a writer for boys, and his standing there was revised upward in the twentieth century. In English he suffered for decades from poor and abridged translations, which cut his science and his jokes, and many of the versions still in circulation, including some on Project Gutenberg, date from that period.

Where to start

Around the World in Eighty Days is the shortest and most purely entertaining of his books. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea is the fuller experience, with Captain Nemo as its reason for lasting.