Jules Verne

French · 1828 to 1905

Born Jules Gabriel Verne on February 8, 1828, in Nantes, France, a bustling port on the Loire, he was the eldest son of an attorney who expected the boy to inherit the family practice. As a child he watched ships depart for the Caribbean and the Indies, and a persistent legend holds that at eleven he tried to stow away aboard a vessel bound for the West Indies, only to be intercepted and returned to his father. Sent to Paris to study law, he passed his examinations but turned instead to the theater, writing librettos and plays under the encouragement of Alexandre Dumas, whom he came to know well. He worked for a time as a stockbroker while writing in the early mornings. His fortunes changed when the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel accepted Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), launching the long series he called the Voyages Extraordinaires. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) followed, each blending meticulous research with adventure, and the last was adapted into a hugely successful stage spectacle. He wrote more than sixty novels, working with the discipline of a clerk, rising before dawn and producing several books a year. In 1886 his nephew Gaston shot him twice in the leg, leaving him with a permanent limp. He served for fifteen years as a town councillor in Amiens, where he had settled with his wife Honorine. He died there on March 24, 1905, at the age of seventy-seven, of complications from diabetes, leaving a drawer of manuscripts that his son Michel would later edit and publish.