Jules Gabriel Verne (February 8, 1828 – March 24, 1905) was a French author who pioneered the science-fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Journey to the Center of the Earth (written in 1864), From the Earth to the Moon (written in 1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (written in 1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (written in 1873). Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before navigable aircraft and practical submarines were invented, and before any means of space travel had been devised. Some of his work has been made into films. Verne, along with H. G. Wells, is often referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction."
Easton Press Jules Verne books
A Journey To The Center of The Earth - The Collector's Library of Famous Editions - 1966Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea - 100 Greatest Books Ever Written - 1977
Around The World In Eighty Days - The Collector's Library of Famous Editions - 1983
Three volume set including:
A Journey To The Center of The Earth
Around The World In Eighty Days
The Mysterious Island
Franklin Library Jules Verne books
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea - World's Best Loved Books - 1978Around the World in Eighty Days - World's Best Loved Books - 1983
Around the World in Eighty Days and From Earth to the Moon - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1985
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Author Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was born to Pierre Verne, an attorney (died 1871), and his wife, Sophie-Henriette Allotte de la Fuÿe (died 1887), in the bustling harbor city of Nantes in Western France. The oldest of five children, he spent his early years at home with his parents. The family spent summers in a country house just outside the city, on the banks of the Loire River. Jules and his brother Paul, of whom Jules was very fond, would often rent a boat for a franc a day[citation needed]. The sight of the many ships navigating the river sparked Jules' imagination, as he describes in the autobiographical short story "Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse". When Jules was nine, he and Paul were sent to boarding school at the Saint Donatien College (Petit séminaire de Saint-Donatien). As a child, he developed a great interest in travel and exploration, a passion he showed as a writer of adventure stories and science fiction.At the boarding school, Verne studied Latin, which he used in his short story "Le Mariage de Monsieur Anselme des Tilleuls" in the mid-1850s. One of his teachers may have been the French inventor Brutus de Villeroi, professor of drawing and mathematics at Saint Donatien in 1842, and who later became famous for creating the US Navy's first submarine, the USS Alligator. De Villeroi may have inspired Verne's conceptual design for the Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, although no direct exchanges between the two men have been recorded.
Writing
After completing his studies at the lycée, Jules Verne went to Paris to study law. About 1848, in conjunction with Michel Carré, he began writing librettos for operettas. For some years his attentions were divided between the theatre and work, but some travelers' stories which he wrote for the Musée des Familles revealed to him his true talent: the telling of delightfully extravagant voyages and adventures to which cleverly prepared scientific and geographical details lent an air of verisimilitude.When Verne's father discovered that his son was writing rather than studying law, he promptly withdrew his financial support. Verne was forced to support himself as a stockbroker, which he hated despite being somewhat successful at it. During this period, he met Alexandre Dumas, père and Victor Hugo, who offered him writing advice. Dumas would become a close friend of Verne.
Verne also met Honorine de Viane Morel, a widow with two daughters. They were married on January 10, 1857. With her encouragement, he continued to write and actively looked for a publisher. On August 3, 1861, their son, Michel Jean Verne, was born. A classic enfant terrible, Michel was sent to Mettray Penal Colony in 1876 and later married an actress (in spite of Verne's objections), had two children by his 16-year-old mistress, and buried himself in debts. The relationship between father and son did improve as Michel grew older.
Verne's situation improved when he met Pierre-Jules Hetzel, one of the most important French publishers of the 19th century, who also published Victor Hugo, Georges Sand, and Erckmann-Chatrian, among others. They formed an excellent writer-publisher team until Hetzel's death. Hetzel helped improve Verne's writings, which until then had been repeatedly rejected by other publishers. Hetzel read a draft of Verne's story about the balloon exploration of Africa, which had been rejected by other publishers for being "too scientific". With Hetzel's help, Verne rewrote the story, which was published in 1863 in book form as Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon). Acting on Hetzel's advice, Verne added comical accents to his novels, changed sad endings into happy ones, and toned down various political messages.
A typical Hetzel front cover for a Jules Verne book. The edition is Les Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras au Pôle Nord, type "Aux deux éléphants".
From that point to years after Verne's death, Hetzel published two or more volumes a year. The most successful of these include: Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864); De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865); Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, 1869); and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), which first appeared in Le Temps in 1872. The series is collectively known as "Les voyages extraordinaires" ("extraordinary voyages"). Verne could now live on his writings. But most of his wealth came from the stage adaptations of Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1874) and Michel Strogoff (1876), a relatively conventional adventure tale set in Tsarist Russia, which he adapted for the stage with Adolphe d'Ennery. In 1867 Verne bought a small ship, the Saint-Michel, which he successively replaced with the Saint-Michel II and the Saint-Michel III as his financial situation improved. On board the Saint-Michel III, he sailed around Europe. In 1870, he was appointed "Chevalier" (Knight) of the Légion d'honneur. After his first novel, most of his stories were first serialised in the Magazine d'Éducation et de Récréation, a Hetzel biweekly publication, before being published in the form of books. His brother Paul contributed to 40th French climbing of the Mont-Blanc and a collection of short stories, Doctor Ox (1874). According to the Unesco Index Translationum, Jules Verne regularly places among the top five most translated authors in the world.
Some critics felt 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea portrayed the British Empire in a bad light, and the first English translator, Reverend Lewis Page Mercier, working under a pseudonym, removed many offending passages, such as those describing the political actions of Captain Nemo in his incarnation as an Indian nobleman. Such negative depictions were not, however, invariable in Verne's works; for example, Facing the Flag features, in the character of Lieutenant Devon, a heroic, self-sacrificing Royal Navy officer worthy of any created by British authors. In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea itself, Captain Nemo, an Indian, is balanced by Ned Land, a Canadian. Some of Verne's most famous heroes were British (e.g. Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days).
Mercier and subsequent British translators also had trouble with the metric system that Verne used, sometimes dropping significant figures, at other times changing the unit to an Imperial measure without changing the corresponding value. Thus Verne's calculations, which in general were remarkably exact, were converted into mathematical gibberish. Also, artistic passages and sometimes whole chapters were cut to fit the work into a constrained space for publication.
For these reasons, Verne's work initially acquired a reputation in English-speaking countries of not being fit for adult readers. This in turn prevented it from being taken seriously enough to merit new translations, and those of Mercier and others were reprinted decade after decade. Only from 1965 on have some of his novels received more accurate translations, but even today Verne's work has not been fully rehabilitated in the English-speaking world.
Verne's works may also reflect the bitterness France felt in the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) and the consequent loss of Alsace and Lorraine. The Begum's Millions (Les Cinq cents millions de la Begum) of 1879 gives a highly stereotypical depiction of Germans as monstrously cruel militarists. By contrast, almost all the protagonists in his pre-1871 works, such as the sympathetic first-person narrator in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, are German.
Hetzel's influence
Hetzel substantially influenced the writings of Verne, who was so happy to finally find a willing publisher that he agreed to almost all changes that Hetzel suggested. Hetzel rejected at least one novel (Paris in the 20th Century), and asked Verne to make significant changes in his other drafts. One of the most important changes Hetzel imposed on Verne was the adoption of a more optimistic tone. Verne was in fact not an enthusiast of technological and human progress, as can be seen in the works he created both before he met Hetzel and after the publisher's death. Hetzel's insistence on a more optimistic text proved correct. For example, The Mysterious Island originally ended with the survivors returning to mainland forever nostalgic about the island. Hetzel decided that the heroes should live happily, so in the revised draft, they use their fortunes to build a replica of the island. Many translations are like this. Also, in order not to offend France's then-ally, Russia, the famous Captain Nemo was changed from a Polish refugee avenging the partitions of Poland and the death of his family, killed in the reprisals following the January Uprising, to an Indian prince fighting the British Empire after the Sikh War.Later years
On March 9, 1886, as Verne approached his own home, his twenty-five-year-old nephew Gaston, who suffered from paranoia, shot twice at him with a gun. One bullet missed, but the second entered Verne's left leg, giving him a permanent limp. Gaston spent the rest of his life in an asylum.After the deaths of Hetzel and his beloved mother in 1887, Verne began writing darker works. This may have been due partly to changes in his personality, but an important factor was that Hetzel's son, who took over his father's business, was not as rigorous in his edits and corrections as Hetzel Sr. had been.
In 1888, Jules Verne entered politics and was elected town councilor of Amiens, where he championed several improvements and served for fifteen years.Though he elected from the left he stood with the right on Dreyfus Affair and was anti-Dreyfusard.
Death
In 1863, Jules Verne wrote Paris in the 20th Century, a novel about a young man who lives in a world of glass skyscrapers, high-speed trains, gas-powered automobiles, calculators, and a worldwide communications network, yet cannot find happiness and comes to a tragic end. Hetzel thought the novel's pessimism would damage Verne's then booming career, and suggested he wait 20 years to publish it. Verne put the manuscript in a safe, where it was discovered by his great-grandson in 1989. It was published in 1994.
Predictions
Jules Verne's novels have been noted for being startlingly accurate anticipations of modern times. Paris in the 20th Century is an often cited example of this as it arguably describes air conditioning, automobiles, the Internet, television, and other modern conveniences very similar to their real world counterparts.
Another example is From the Earth to the Moon, which is uncannily similar to the real Apollo Program, as three astronauts are launched from the Florida peninsula and recovered through a splash landing. In the book, the spacecraft is launched from "Tampa Town"; Tampa, Florida is approximately 130 miles from NASA's actual launching site at Cape Canaveral. [6]
In other works, Verne predicted the inventions of helicopters, submarines, projectors, jukeboxes, and other later devices.
He also predicted the existence of underwater hydrothermal vents that were not discovered until years after he wrote about them.
Jules Verne books
Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863)
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866)
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)
From the Earth to the Moon (1865)
In Search of the Castaways or Captain Grant's Children (1867-1868)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869-1870)
Around The Moon (a sequel to From the Earth to the Moon - 1870)
A Floating City (1871)
The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa (1872)
The Fur Country (1873)
Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)
The Mysterious Island (1875)
The Survivors of the Chancellor (1875)
Michael Strogoff (1876)
Off on a Comet (1877)
The Child of the Cavern, also known as Black Diamonds or The Black Indies (1877)
Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen (1878)
The Begum's Millions (1879)
Tribulations of a Chinaman in China (1879)
The Steam House (1879)
Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon (1881)
Godfrey Morgan (1882)
The Green Ray (1882)
Kéraban the Inflexible (1883)
The Vanished Diamond (1884)
The Archipelago on Fire (1884)
Mathias Sandorf (1885)
The Lottery Ticket (1886)
Robur the Conqueror or The Clipper of the Clouds (1886)
North Against South (1887)
The Flight to France (1887)
Two Years' Vacation (1888)
Family Without a Name (1888)
The Purchase of the North Pole (the second sequel to From the Earth to the Moon - 1889)
César Cascabel (1890)
Mistress Branican (1891)
Carpathian Castle (1892)
Claudius Bombarnac (1892)
Foundling Mick (1893)
Captain Antifer (1894)
Propeller Island (1895)
Facing the Flag (1896)
Clovis Dardentor (1896)
An Antarctic Mystery (1897)
The Mighty Orinoco (1898)
The Will of an Eccentric (1899)
The Castaways of the Flag (1900)
The Village in the Treetops (1901)
The Sea Serpent (1901)
The Kip Brothers (1902)
Traveling Scholarships (1903)
A Drama in Livonia (1904)
Master of the World (sequel to Robur the Conqueror - 1904)
Invasion of the Sea (1905)
Other novels and short story collections
1874 - Doctor Ox short story collection
1905 - The Lighthouse at the End of the World
1908 - The Chase of the Golden Meteor
1908 - The Danube Pilot
1909 - The Survivors of the 'Jonathan'
1994 - Paris in the Twentieth Century (written in 1863)
Non-fiction
1878 - Histoire des grands voyages et des grands voyageurs
Short stories
1851 - A Drama in Mexico
1851 - A Drama in the Air
1852 - Martin Paz
1854 - Master Zacharius
1855 - A Winter Amid the Ice
1864 - Le Comte de Chanteleine
1865 - The Blockade Runners
1872 - Dr. Ox's Experiment
1875 - An Ideal City
1879 - The Mutineers of the Bounty
1881 - Ten Hours Hunting
1884 - Frritt-Flacc
1887 - Gil Braltar
1891 - Adventures of the Rat Family
1893 - Mr. Ray Sharp and Miss Me Flat
Apocrypha
1910 - The Eternal Adam (possibly written by his son Michel Verne)
Source and additional information: Jules Verne