Jules Verne

Jules Verne was born in the French port of Nantes, and his father sent him to Paris to study law. He preferred to write plays and stories, and spent long hours in libraries reading everything he could find on geography, science and machines.

Success came in 1863, when the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel brought out Five Weeks in a Balloon and signed him to a long contract. The result was the Extraordinary Voyages, dozens of novels that took readers under the sea, into the earth and around the world. He spent most of his life in Amiens, where he died in 1905. Verne wrote in French; the books here are in their nineteenth-century English translations.

Jules Verne on the site

Around the World in Eighty DaysPublished in 1873 About 5 hours read Phileas Fogg, a London gentleman who lives by the clock, bets his club twenty thousand pounds that he can travel around the world in eighty days. He leaves that same evening with his new French valet, Passepartout, and with a detective on his heels who believes he is a bank robber. Jules Verne's 1873 novel crosses India by elephant and America by train, and saves its best trick for the last page. Journey to the Center of the EarthPublished in 1864 About 5 hours read Professor Liedenbrock of Hamburg finds a coded note in an old Icelandic book: a sixteenth-century alchemist claims to have reached the center of the earth through a volcano in Iceland. He drags his nervous nephew Axel north to follow him down. With their silent guide Hans they find a sea underground, forests of giant mushrooms and creatures long extinct. Jules Verne published the novel in 1864. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the SeaPublished in 1870 About 8 hours read A monster is sinking ships, and Professor Aronnax sails with a harpoon-thrower named Ned Land to hunt it. The monster turns out to be a submarine, the Nautilus, and its master, Captain Nemo, keeps them aboard for good. They walk on the sea floor, see drowned Atlantis and fight a giant squid, while Nemo's hatred of the world on land grows darker. Jules Verne's novel appeared in 1870. The Mysterious IslandPublished in 1875 About 14 hours read Five men escape a Civil War siege in a balloon, and a storm throws them onto an unknown island in the Pacific with nothing but the clothes they stand in. Led by the engineer Cyrus Harding, they make fire, bricks, iron and glass from what they find. But strange things keep happening: a bullet in a wild pig, a box washed ashore, a light in the night. Someone else is on the island. Jules Verne's novel appeared in 1875.