Pierre-Jules Hetzel was a French publisher and editor born in 1814, who is inseparable from the career of Jules Verne and who shaped it more directly than most publishers shape any author's.
He bought Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1863 and put Verne under a long-term contract producing several volumes a year, published as the Voyages Extraordinaires. He edited heavily, required optimism and educational content, and rejected the manuscript of Paris in the Twentieth Century as too pessimistic, a novel that remained unpublished until 1994.
His house also produced the famous illustrated red-and-gold bound editions that made the Verne novels objects as much as texts, and he published Balzac, Hugo, and George Sand. He died in 1886, after which Verne's work grew noticeably darker.