Jules Verne

Jules Gabriel Verne was born in Nantes in 1828, the son of a lawyer who sent him to Paris to study law and who was disappointed when he began writing plays instead. He worked briefly as a stockbroker while writing in the mornings.

His career was made by his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who bought Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1863 and put Verne under a contract that would run for decades and produce the sequence eventually titled Voyages Extraordinaires. Hetzel shaped the books considerably, requiring optimism and educational content and rejecting the manuscript of Paris in the Twentieth Century as too pessimistic, a novel that remained unpublished until 1994.

Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days followed within a decade, and made him one of the most widely read novelists in the world. He is consistently among the most translated authors in any language.

He was more interested in geography and in the machinery of exploration than in prophecy, and the reputation as a predictor of technology has been overstated by readers looking backward. What he was doing was extrapolating carefully from the engineering of his own moment, which is a different and more disciplined activity.

Three of the novels form a connected sequence. In Search of the Castaways maroons the mutinous quartermaster Tom Ayrton on an island. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea leaves Captain Nemo's fate unresolved. The Mysterious Island brings both threads together, and the dates do not reconcile, which Verne never went back to fix.

His later work grew darker, particularly after he was shot in the leg by a nephew in 1886 and left permanently lame, and after Hetzel's death removed the editorial pressure toward optimism. He died in Amiens in 1905.