Jules Verne

By Dimitris S. and Giannis S.

Biography

Jules Gabriel Verne (F 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright and was among the first authors that wrote literary novels.

He was born by bourgeois parents in the seaport of Nantes. Verne was trained to follow his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.

Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, not least because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted.

Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, between the English-language writers Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare, and probably was the most-translated during the 1960s and 1970s. He is one of the authors sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction", as are H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback.

Verne's largest body of work is the Voyages Extraordinaires series, which includes all of his novels except for the two rejected manuscripts Paris in the Twentieth Century and Backwards to Britain (published posthumously in 1989 and 1994, respectively) and for projects left unfinished at his death (many of which would be posthumously adapted or rewritten for publication by his son Michel). Verne also wrote many plays, poems, song texts, operetta libretti, and short stories, as well as a variety of essays and miscellaneous non-fiction.

Verne's growing popularity among readers and playgoers (due especially to the highly successful stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days) led to a gradual change in his literary reputation. As the novels and stage productions continued to sell, many contemporary critics felt that Verne's status as a commercially popular author meant he could only be seen as a mere genre-based storyteller, rather than a serious author worthy of academic study.

The most important books

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869)

Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)The Mysterious Island (1874)From the Earth to the Moon (1865)

Adrift in the Pasific: Two Years Vacation (1888)

Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar (1876)

In Search of the Castaways (1867-1868)

The Master of the World (1904)

Round the Moon (1870)

The original cover of the book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Various covers of various books of Jules Verne.

Sources

• en.wikipedia.org

• goodreads.com