Jules Verne (1828 to 1905) was a French novelist whose “Voyages extraordinaires”, a sequence of more than fifty adventure novels, includes “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas” and “Around the World in Eighty Days”. He has been the second most translated author in the world since 1979, behind Agatha Christie.
Verne was born in Nantes on 8 February 1828, the eldest son of a lawyer, and was sent to Paris in 1847 to study law. He took his law degree in 1851 but spent much of his time in literary salons and the theatre, became a friend of Alexandre Dumas fils, and saw his comedy “Les Pailles rompues” staged in 1850. In 1852 he turned down his father’s law practice. He worked as secretary of the Théâtre Lyrique and wrote stories for the magazine “Musée des familles”. After marrying Honorine Morel, a widow with two children, in 1857, he took a job as a broker on the Paris Bourse and rose early each morning to write.
In 1862 he met the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who brought out “Five Weeks in a Balloon” on 31 January 1863 and signed him to a long-term contract. Most of the novels that followed were serialised in Hetzel’s “Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation” before appearing as books, and from 1866 Hetzel presented them as a single sequence, the “Voyages extraordinaires”.
The most successful books came early: “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” (1864), “From the Earth to the Moon” (1865), “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas” (1869 to 1870), with its submariner Captain Nemo, and “Around the World in Eighty Days”, which first appeared in the newspaper “Le Temps” in 1872. Most of his wealth came from the stage versions of “Around the World in Eighty Days” and “Michael Strogoff”, written with Adolphe d’Ennery.
In 1886 Verne was shot in the leg by his nephew Gaston and left with a permanent limp. Two years later he was elected a town councillor in Amiens, an office he held for fifteen years. He died at his home in Amiens on 24 March 1905.
His son Michel oversaw the novels published after his death and was later found to have altered them extensively; the original versions were issued by the Société Jules Verne at the end of the twentieth century. “Paris in the Twentieth Century”, which Hetzel had rejected, was first published in 1994. Verne’s work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema.
Publication Order of Voyages Extraordinaires Books
| Five Weeks in a Balloon | 1863 |
| Journey to the Centre of the Earth | 1864 |
| From the Earth to the Moon | 1865 |
| The Adventures of Captain Hatteras | 1866 |
| In Search of the Castaways / Captain Grant’s Children | 1867 |
| Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas | 1869 |
| Around the Moon | 1870 |
| A Floating City | 1871 |
| The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa | 1872 |
| The Fur Country | 1873 |
| Around the World in Eighty Days | 1873 |
| The Mysterious Island | 1874 |
| The Survivors of the Chancellor | 1875 |
| Michael Strogoff | 1876 |
| Off on a Comet / Hector Servadac | 1877 |
| The Child of the Cavern | 1877 |
| Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen | 1878 |
| The Begum’s Millions / The Begum’s Fortune | 1879 |
| Tribulations of a Chinaman in China | 1879 |
| The Steam House | 1880 |
| The Giant Raft | 1881 |
| Godfrey Morgan / The School for Robinsons | 1882 |
| The Green Ray | 1882 |
| Kéraban the Inflexible | 1883 |
| The Vanished Diamond | 1884 |
| The Archipelago on Fire | 1884 |
| Mathias Sandorf | 1885 |
| The Lottery Ticket | 1886 |
| Robur the Conqueror / The Clipper of the Clouds | 1886 |
| North Against South | 1887 |
| The Flight to France | 1887 |
| Two Years’ Vacation | 1888 |
| Family Without a Name | 1889 |
| The Purchase of the North Pole | 1889 |
| César Cascabel | 1890 |
| Mistress Branican | 1891 |
| The Carpathian Castle | 1892 |
| Claudius Bombarnac | 1893 |
| Foundling Mick | 1893 |
| Captain Antifer | 1894 |
| Propeller Island | 1895 |
| Facing the Flag | 1896 |
| Clovis Dardentor | 1896 |
| An Antarctic Mystery / The Sphinx of the Ice | 1897 |
| The Mighty Orinoco | 1898 |
| The Will of an Eccentric | 1899 |
| The Castaways of the Flag | 1900 |
| The Village in the Treetops | 1901 |
| The Sea Serpent | 1901 |
| The Kip Brothers | 1902 |
| Travel Scholarships | 1903 |
| A Drama in Livonia | 1904 |
| Master of the World | 1904 |
| Invasion of the Sea | 1905 |
Publication Order of Posthumous Voyages Extraordinaires Books
| The Lighthouse at the End of the World | 1905 |
| The Golden Volcano | 1906 |
| The Thompson Travel Agency | 1907 |
| The Chase of the Golden Meteor | 1908 |
| The Danube Pilot | 1908 |
| The Survivors of the Jonathan | 1909 |
| The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz | 1910 |
| The Barsac Mission | 1919 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Wreck of the Cynthia (With: André Laurie) | 1885 |
| Backwards to Britain | 1989 |
| Uncle Robinson | 1991 |
| A Priest in 1839 | 1992 |
| Paris in the Twentieth Century | 1994 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Doctor Ox | 1874 |
| Yesterday and Tomorrow | 1910 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Illustrated Geography of France and Its Colonies (With: Théophile Lavallée) | 1866 |
| Discovery of the Earth (With: Gabriel Marcel) | 1870 |
Photo: Nadar, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).