68 Facts About Jules Verne

Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright.

Jules Verne's work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music and video games.

Jules Verne's reputation was markedly different in the Anglosphere where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed.

Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare.

Jules Verne has sometimes been called the "father of science fiction", a title that has been given to H G Wells and Hugo Gernsback.

Jules Verne's parents were Pierre Verne, an attorney originally from Provins, and Sophie Allotte de La Fuye, a Nantes woman from a local family of navigators and shipowners, of distant Scottish descent.

In 1829, the Jules Verne family moved some hundred metres away to No 2 Quai Jean-Bart, where Jules Verne's brother Paul was born the same year.

In 1834, at the age of six, Jules Verne was sent to boarding school at 5 Place du Bouffay in Nantes.

Jules Verne quickly distinguished himself in memoire, geography, Greek, Latin, and singing.

Jules Verne took vacations at Brains, in the house of his uncle Prudent Allotte, a retired shipowner, who had gone around the world and served as mayor of Brains from 1828 to 1837.

Jules Verne took joy in playing interminable rounds of the Game of the Goose with his uncle, and both the game and his uncle's name would be memorialized in two late novels.

Legend has it that in 1839, at the age of 11, Jules 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 Jules Verne arrived just in time to catch his son and make him promise to travel "only in his imagination".

However, his father took it for granted that Jules Verne, being the firstborn son of the family, would not attempt to make money in literature but would instead inherit the family law practice.

In 1847, Jules Verne's father sent him to Paris, primarily to begin his studies in law school, and secondarily to distance him temporarily from Nantes.

Jules Verne's passion seems to have been reciprocated, at least for a short time, but Grossetiere's parents frowned upon the idea of their daughter marrying a young student of uncertain future.

Jules Verne wrote a hallucinatory letter to his mother, apparently composed in a state of half-drunkenness, in which under pretext of a dream he described his misery.

The incident led Jules Verne to bear a grudge against his birthplace and Nantes society, which he criticized in his poem La sixieme ville de France.

In July 1848, Jules Verne left Nantes again for Paris, where his father intended him to finish law studies and take up law as a profession.

Jules Verne obtained permission from his father to rent a furnished apartment at 24 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comedie, which he shared with Edouard Bonamy, another student of Nantes origin.

Jules Verne arrived in Paris during a time of political upheaval: the French Revolution of 1848.

Jules Verne entered the city shortly before the election of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as the first president of the Republic, a state of affairs that would last until the French coup of 1851.

Jules Verne used his family connections to make an entrance into Paris society.

Thanks to his visits to salons, Jules Verne came into contact in 1849 with Alexandre Dumas through the mutual acquaintance of a celebrated chirologist of the time, the Chevalier d'Arpentigny.

Jules Verne became close friends with Dumas' son, Alexandre Dumas fils, and showed him a manuscript for a stage comedy, Les Pailles rompues.

In 1851, Jules Verne met with a fellow writer from Nantes, Pierre-Michel-Francois Chevalier, the editor-in-chief of the magazine Musee des familles.

Jules Verne, with his delight in diligent research, especially in geography, was a natural for the job.

Jules Verne first offered him a short historical adventure story, The First Ships of the Mexican Navy, written in the style of James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels had deeply influenced him.

Jules Verne accepted, using the opportunity to write and produce several comic operas written in collaboration with Hignard and the prolific librettist Michel Carre.

For some time, Jules Verne's father pressed him to abandon his writing and begin a business as a lawyer.

However, Jules Verne argued in his letters that he could only find success in literature.

Meanwhile, Jules Verne was spending much time at the Bibliotheque nationale de France, conducting research for his stories and feeding his passion for science and recent discoveries, especially in geography.

In 1852, two new pieces from Jules Verne appeared in the Musee des familles: Martin Paz, a novella set in Lima, which Jules Verne wrote in 1851 and published 10 July through 11 August 1852, and Les Chateaux en Californie, ou, Pierre qui roule n'amasse pas mousse, a one-act comedy full of racy double entendres.

Jules Verne is said to have discussed the project with the elder Alexandre Dumas, who had tried something similar with an unfinished novel, Isaac Laquedem, and who enthusiastically encouraged Verne's project.

Jules Verne continued to write plays and musical comedies, most of which were not performed.

In May 1856, Jules Verne traveled to Amiens to be the best man at the wedding of a Nantes friend, Auguste Lelarge, to an Amiens woman named Aimee du Fraysne de Viane.

Jules Verne, invited to stay with the bride's family, took to them warmly, befriending the entire household and finding himself increasingly attracted to the bride's sister, Honorine Anne Hebee Morel, a widow aged 26 with two young children.

Jules Verne's father was initially dubious but gave in to his son's requests for approval in November 1856.

Jules Verne plunged into his new business obligations, leaving his work at the Theatre Lyrique and taking up a full-time job as an agent de change on the Paris Bourse, where he became the associate of the broker Fernand Eggly.

Jules Verne woke up early each morning so that he would have time to write, before going to the Bourse for the day's work; in the rest of his spare time, he continued to consort with the Onze-Sans-Femme club.

Jules Verne left Hignard in Denmark to return in haste to Paris, but missed the birth on 3 August 1861 of his only biological son, Michel.

Meanwhile, Jules Verne continued work on the idea of a "Roman de la Science", which he developed in a rough draft, inspired, according to his recollections, by his "love for maps and the great explorers of the world".

In 1862, through their mutual acquaintance Alfred de Brehat, Verne came into contact with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, and submitted to him the manuscript of his developing novel, then called Voyage en Ballon.

Jules Verne saw Verne, with his demonstrated inclination toward scrupulously researched adventure stories, as an ideal contributor for such a magazine, and accepted the novel, giving Verne suggestions for improvement.

Jules Verne made the proposed revisions within two weeks and returned to Hetzel with the final draft, now titled Five Weeks in a Balloon.

Jules Verne, finding both a steady salary and a sure outlet for writing at last, accepted immediately.

For example, when Hetzel disapproved of the original climax of Captain Hatteras, including the death of the title character, Jules Verne wrote an entirely new conclusion in which Hatteras survived.

Hetzel, not wanting to alienate the lucrative Russian market for Jules Verne's books, demanded that Nemo be made an enemy of the slave trade, a situation that would make him an unambiguous hero.

Jules Verne, after fighting vehemently against the change, finally invented a compromise in which Nemo's past is left mysterious.

From that point, Jules Verne published two or more volumes a year.

In 1867, Jules Verne bought a small boat, the Saint-Michel, which he successively replaced with the Saint-Michel II and the Saint-Michel III as his financial situation improved.

Meanwhile, Michel Jules Verne married an actress against his father's wishes, had two children by an underage mistress and buried himself in debts.

On 9 March 1886, as Jules Verne returned home, his twenty-six-year-old nephew, Gaston, shot at him twice with a pistol.

The first bullet missed, but the second one entered Jules Verne's left leg, giving him a permanent limp that could not be overcome.

Jules Verne was made a knight of France's Legion of Honour on 9 April 1870, and subsequently promoted in Legion of Honour rank to Officer on 19 July 1892.

On 24 March 1905, while ill with chronic diabetes and complications from a stroke which paralyzed his right side, Verne died at his home in Amiens, 44 Boulevard Longueville.

In 1919, Michel Jules Verne published The Barsac Mission, whose original drafts contained references to Esperanto, a language that his father had been very interested in.

In 1989, Jules Verne's great-grandson discovered his ancestor's as-yet-unpublished novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, which was published in 1994.

Jules Verne wrote many plays, poems, song texts, operetta libretti, and short stories, as well as a variety of essays and miscellaneous non-fiction.

Several notable contemporary figures, from the geographer Vivien de Saint-Martin to the critic Jules Claretie, spoke highly of Verne and his works in critical and biographical notes.

However, Jules Verne's growing popularity among readers and playgoers led to a gradual change in his literary reputation.

Since these events, Jules Verne has been consistently recognized in Europe as a legitimate member of the French literary canon, with academic studies and new publications steadily continuing.

Jules Verne's prose is lean and fast-moving in a peculiarly modern way.

The relationship between Jules Verne's Voyages extraordinaires and the literary genre science fiction is a complex one.

Maurice Renard claimed that Jules Verne "never wrote a single sentence of scientific-marvelous".

Jules Verne himself argued repeatedly in interviews that his novels were not meant to be read as scientific, saying "I have invented nothing".

Closely related to Jules Verne's science-fiction reputation is the often-repeated claim that he is a "prophet" of scientific progress, and that many of his novels involve elements of technology that were fantastic for his day but later became commonplace.

Jules Verne is credited with helping inspire the steampunk genre, a literary and social movement that glamorizes science fiction based on 19th-century technology.