Jules Verne
BiographyJules Gabriel Verne (February 8, 1828–March 24, 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) that are often classified in the science fiction genre. Consequently the honorific “the father of science fiction” is often applied to him (the same title being given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback at times).
Born on Île Feydeau, a small artificial island on the river Loire within the town of Nantes, his parents were Pierre Verne, an attorney originally from Provins, and Sophie Allotte de La Fuÿe, a Nantes woman from a local family of navigators and shipowners of distant Scottish descent. In 1836 Verne went to École Saint‑Stanislas, a Catholic school suiting the pious religious tastes of his father. Verne quickly distinguished himself in mémoire (recitation from memory), geography, Greek, Latin, and singing. Legend has it that in 1839, at the age of 11, Verne secretly procured a spot as cabin boy on the three-mast ship Coralie with the intention of traveling to the Indies and bringing back a coral necklace for his cousin Caroline. The evening the ship set out for the Indies, it stopped first at Paimboeuf where Pierre Verne arrived just in time to catch his son and make him promise to travel “only in his imagination.” It is now thought that the legend is an exaggerated tale invented by Verne’s first biographer, his niece Marguerite Allotte de la Füye, though it may have been inspired by a real incident. By 1847, when he was 19, he had taken seriously to writing long works in the style of Victor Hugo, though his father took it for granted he would not attempt to make money in literature but would instead inherit the family law practice.
In 1848 Verne left Nantes again for Paris, where his father intended him to finish law studies and take up law as a profession. Verne used his family connections to make an entrance into Paris society. His uncle Francisque de Chatêaubourg introduced him into literary salons, and he particularly frequented those of Mme de Barrère, a friend of his mother’s. While continuing his law studies, he fed his passion for the theater, writing numerous plays. Though writing profusely and frequenting the salons, he diligently pursued his law studies and graduated with a licence en droit in January 1851. For some time his father pressed him to abandon his writing and begin a business as a lawyer, but Verne argued in his letters that he could only find success in literature. The pressure to plan for a secure future in law reached its climax in January 1852 when his father offered him his own Nantes law practice. Faced with this ultimatum, Verne decided conclusively to continue his literary life and refuse the job, writing: “Am I not right to follow my own instincts? It’s because I know who I am that I realize what I can be one day.” After a successful literary career that made him world famous and the second-most-translated author in the world (after Agatha Christie), he died aged 77 at his home in Amiens from complications of chronic diabetes and a stroke which paralyzed his right side.
Bibliography (wildly incomplete)
The First Ships of the Mexican Navy (1851)
Master Zacharius (1854)
Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863)
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1865)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870)
A Floating City (1871)
Around the World in Eighty Days (1872)
The Black-Indies (1877)
Mathias Sandorf (1885)
Paris in the Twentieth Century (discovered by his great-grandson and published posthumously in 1994)
Other links
Britannica
Jules Verne bibliography by Wikipedia
Wikipedia