1828-1905 · French novelist, author of the Voyages extraordinaires adventure novels
About Jules Verne
Jules Verne (1828-1905) was a French novelist born in Nantes, a port city whose ships fed his early love of the sea. Trained in law in Paris, he turned to writing and in 1863 began a lifelong partnership with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who issued Five Weeks in a Balloon and then the long series of Voyages extraordinaires, including Journey to the Centre of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon and Around the World in Eighty Days. He spent his later life in Amiens, where he also served on the town council.
“The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.”
1869-1870 (French); English 1872-73 · 19th Century · Novel
In 1866 ships in several oceans report a huge, swift, glowing creature, and some are holed by it. Pierre Aronnax, a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris who happens to be in New York, publishes the opinion that it is a gigantic narwhal and is invited to join the American frigate Abraham Lincoln, under Commander Farragut, which sails to hunt it.
Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, in George Makepeace Towle’s public-domain English translation, follows Phileas Fogg’s Reform Club wager to circle the globe in eighty days with his servant Passepartout, while detective Fix shadows him as a bank-robbery suspect. Steamships, railways, elephants, and storms turn geography into a race; calm precision meets loyal improvisation.