Jules Verne Biography and List of Works

Enormously popular French author, considered the founding father of science fiction alongside H.G. Wells. Verne's stories, written for adolescents as well as adults, caught the enterprising spirit of the 19th century, its uncritical fascination with scientific progress and inventions. His works are often written in the form of a travel book, which takes the readers on a voyage to the moon in From the Earth to the Moon (1865) or in another direction as in A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864). Many of Verne's ideas have been hailed as prophetic. Among his best-known novels is the classic adventure story Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).

"Ah - what a journey - what a marvellous and extraordinary journey! Here we had entered the earth by one volcano, and we had come out by another. And this other was situated more than twelve hundred leagues from Sneffels, from that drear country of Iceland cast away on the confines of the earth... We had abandoned the region of eternal snows for that infinite verdure, and had left over our heads the grey fog of the icy regions to come back to the azure sky of Sicily!"
(from A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864)

Jules Verne was born and raised in the port of Nantes. His father was a prosperous lawyer. In order to continue the practice, Verne moved to Paris, where he studied law. His uncle introduced him into literary circles and he started to publish plays under the influence of such writers as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas (fils), whom Verne also knew personally. Verne's one-act comedy The Broken Straws was performed in Paris when he was 22. In spite of his busy writing schedule, Verne managed to pass his law degree. During this period Verne suffered from digestive problems, which then recurred at intervals through his life.

In 1854 Charles Baudelaire translated Edgar Allan Poe's works into French. Verne became one of the most devoted admirers of the American author, and wrote his first science fiction tale, 'An voyage in Balloon' (1851), under the influence of Poe. Later Verne would write a sequel to Poe's unfinished novel, Narrative of a Gordon Pym, entitled The Sphinz of the Ice-Fields (1897). When his career as an author progressed slowly, Verne turned to stock broking, an occupation that he held until his successful tale Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) was published in the series VOYAGES EXTRAORDINAIRES. In 1862 Verne had met in Pierre Jules Hetzel, a publisher and writer for children, who started to publish Verne's 'Extraordinary Journeys'. This cooperation lasted until the end of Verne's career. Hetzel had also worked with Balzac and George Sand. He read Verne's manuscripts carefully and did not hesitate to suggest corrections. The publisher turned down Verne's early work, Paris in the Twentieth Century, and it did not appear until 1997 in English.

Verne's novels soon gained a huge popularity throughout the world. Without the education of a scientist or experiences as a traveller, Verne spent much of his time in research for his books. In contrast to contemporary fantasy literature, exemplified by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865), Verne tried to be realistic and practical in details. When H.G. Well's invented in The First Men in the Moon 'cavourite,' a substance impervious to gravity, Verne was not satisfied: "I sent my characters to the moon with gunpowder, a thing one may see every day. Where does M. Wells find his cavourite? Let him show it to me!" However, when the logic of the story contradicted contemporary scientific knowledge, Verne did not keep to the facts and probabilities too slavishly. Around the World in Eighty Days centres on Philèas Fogg's daring but realistic travels on account of a wager, based on a real journey by the US traveller George Francis Train (1829-1904). A Journey to the Centre of the Earth is vulnerable to criticism on geological grounds. The story depicts an expedition that enters the hollow heart of the Earth. In Hector Servadac (1877) a comet takes Hector and his servant on a trip around the Solar System. In a tongue-in-cheek episode they discover a fragment of the Rock of Gibraltar, occupied by two Englishmen playing chess.

In Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Verne introduces one of the forefathers of the modern superhero, the misanthropic Captain Nemo and his elaborate submarine, Nautilus, named after Robert Fulton's steam-powered submarine. The Mysterious Island centres on the industrial exploits of men stranded on an island (see: Robinsonade, Daniel Defoe). In these works, filmed on several occasions, Verne combines science and invention with fast-paced adventure. Much of Verne's fiction has become a fact: his submarine Nautilus predated the first successful power submarine by a quarter century, and his spaceship predicts the development of space exploration that was to come a century later. The first all-electric submarine, built in 1886 by two Englishmen, was named Nautilus in honour of Verne's vessel. The first nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1955, was also named Nautilus.

In the first part of his career Verne expresses his technophile optimism concerning progress and Europe's central role in the social and technical development of the world. However, Verne's imagination sometimes contradicts fact: In From Earth to the Moon a giant cannon shoots the protagonist into orbit. Any contemporary scientist could have told Verne, that the passengers would be killed by the initial acceleration. (The idea of a space gun first appeared in print in the 18th-century, and Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyages to the Moon and Sun (1655), first applied the concept of a rocket for space travel).

"It is difficult to say how seriously Verne took the idea of this mammoth cannon, because so much of the story is facetiously written... Probably he believed that if such a gun could be built, it might be capable of sending a projectile to the Moon, but it seems unlikely that he seriously imagined that any of the occupants would have survived the shock of takeoff."
(Arthur C. Clarke in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! 1999)

All of Verne's major works were written by 1880. In his later novels the author's pessimism concerning the future of human civilization reflects the doom-laden fin-de-siècle atmosphere. In his tale 'The Eternal Adam' a far-future historian discovers that 20th-century civilization was overthrown by geological cataclysms, and the legend of Adam and Eve becomes both true and cyclical. In Robur the Conqueror (1886) Verne predicts the birth of heavier-than-air craft, but in the sequel, Master of the World (1904), the great inventor Robur suffers from megalomania, and plays a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities.

From the 1860s Verne spent an uneventful, bourgeois life. In 1867 he travelled with his brother Paul to the United States, visiting the Niagara falls. When he made a boat trip around the Mediterranean, he was celebrated in Gibraltar, North Africa, and in Rome Pope Leo XIII blessed his books. In 1871 he settled in Amiens and in 1888 was elected councillor. In 1886 Verne survived a murder attempt. His paranoid nephew, Gaston, shot him in the leg leaving the author disabled for the rest of his life. Gaston never recovered his sanity.

At the age of 28 Verne had married Honorine de Viane, a young widow, and acquired two stepchildren. He lived with his family in a large provincial house and yachted occasionally. To the horror of his family, he started to admire Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), who devoted himself to a life as a revolutionary, and whose character possibly influenced the noble anarchist of NAUFRAGÉS DE JONATHAN (1909). Kropotkin wrote of an anarchy based on mutual support and trust. Verne's interest in socialistic theories was already evident in MATHIAS SANDORF (1885).

For over 40 years Verne published at least one book per year on a wide range subjects. Although Verne wrote about exotic places, he travelled relatively little - his only balloon flight lasted twenty-four minutes. In a letter to Hetzel he confessed: "I must be slightly off my head. I get caught up in all the extraordinary adventures of my heroes. I regret only one thing, not being able to accompany them pedibus cum jambis." Verne's oeuvre includes 65 novels, some twenty short stories and essays, thirty plays, some geographical works, and opera librettos. Verne died in Amiens on March 24, 1905.

For further reading: Jules Verne by Kenneth Allott (1940); Jules Verne and His Works by I.O. Evans (1966); Jules Verne by B. Becker (1966); Le Trés Curieux Jules Verne by M. More (1969); The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne by Jean Chesneaux (1972); Jules Verne by Jean-Jules Verne (1976), Jules Verne by Peter Costello (1978); Jules Verne: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography by Edward J. Gallagher, Judith Mistichelli and John A. Van Eerde (1980); Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Self by William Butcher (1990); The Mask of the Prophet by Andrew Martin (1990); Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography by Herbert R. Lottman (1997).

VOYAGES EXTRAORDINAIRES, (1863)
DE LA TERRE Á LA LUNE, (1865)
LE 'CHANCELLOR', (1875)