Jules Verne

Considered a visionary, Verne was highly regarded for his works on the future of mankind, space travels and sea depths travels. French writer, but also hopeless dreamer, Jules Verne was a famous forerunner of Science-Fiction literature.

Childhood

1828   The man who foresaw in his writings the flight to the Moon, the building up of sky-scrapers, the emerging of high speed trains and the inventing of computers was born in Nantes at December the 8th in an unfailing catholic family. He was the oldest of the five children of prosecutor Pierre Verne and his wife, Sofia. Young Jules Verne was a wistful character, often distracted, his best friend being his own brother, Paul. They would often play on river sides watching steamboats passing and dreaming of exotic journeys, full of adventures. They would often stand and watch in amazement the new technological discoveries of the time, as the steam-based industrial revolution was flourishing.

1837   At 9, he was sent to school at the Saint Donatien High-school.

1840   At 12, he embarked illicitly on Coralie ship, with destination India, but the boat stopped at Paimboeuf, where Jules remarked, flabbergasted, his father coming aboard. A neighbor had seen Jules getting on the ship and had alerted his parents. His father switched him rather seriously, this causing him to swear he would never again travel else but in his mind. During high-school, his drawing and math teacher was Brutus de Villeroi, the one to have designed, later on (1862), the first submarine for US Navy, „Alligator”. It might be that Jules were inspired by Brutus in writing „20.000 leagues under the sea”, published in 1872, only that the submarine he had created was the fruit of his extraordinary imagination.

Adolescence and youth

1848   After graduating high-school, Verne left for Paris, in order to study Law. In 1848, together with librettist Michel Carre, he started working at operettas. When his father learned about what his son was after, instead of studying for the Law School, he cut off the money he was offering him. Jules Verne was forced to sell the short stories he was working at to make a living. He would spend hours in Paris libraries learning astronomy, geology and mathematics, studying engineering thorough fully and gathering all kind of information from newspapers, managing to collect an impressing file cabinet, with over 20 000 information in the most varied of science fields.
Forced to gain his living by exploiting his passion, Jules started frequenting literary circles. There he met Alexandre Dumas – father and Victor Hugo, who were to become his writing mentors.

1856   With Alexandre Dumas, he made friends and it was him who helped Jules Verne become a secretary at the Lyrical Theater. This job offered him enough stability and provided him with enough time write in silence. But, in 1856, he met his ”muse”. It was a widow with two daughters, Honorine de Viane Morel, two years older than Jules. His love was strong, but Jules could not afford to keep four persons.

1857-01-10   Honoria’s brother helped him, by hiring him in an exchange office so the two could finally get at January the 4th 1857. Aided by his optimism and her encouragements, Jules Verne continued writing and actively seeking an editor to publish his book.

1861-08-04   Jules would walk up at five o’clock in the morning and would write his short stories until 10.00, before leaving for work. At August the 4th 1861, their son was born, Michel Jean Pierre Verne, a troubled child, who was enclosed in the penitentiary colony of Mettray at the age of 15. His father described him as an enfant terrible (terrible child). Tied down the objections expressed by Jules Verne, el he secretly married an actress and had two children.
With a family to maintain, he sacrificed theater and literature for a fixed monthly wage, he had to quit theater and literature, working as a broker in Paris, in spite of hating this job strongly.
Caught in everyday life, Jules Verne found his shelter in fiction – writing and maybe looking for a mean to make a living without having to work as a broker. He spent his following 6 years writing plays, novels and short stories in his free time, most of all unsuccessfully. The novel that was to power his career was inspired by the brave photographer and balloon traveler, Felix Tournachon (Nadar). Balloon travels were the most extraordinary challenges of the time, the first success in the attempt by men to conquest ether, to fly.

Literary debut

1863   A cornerstone in the literary life of was the encounter with Pierre-Jules Hetzel, one of the most important French editors, who had published works by Victor Hugo, George Sand, Erckmann-Chatrian and several others. When the two met, Jules Verne was 35 years old and Pierre-Jules Hetzel - 50 and, ever since then, Hetzel’s death, they formed an excellent tandem – writer and editor. At Hetzel’s advice, Jules Verne added comic accents in his novels, changed sad endings into happy ones and enclosed political messages in his works. Hetzel intuited the huge potential of this new literary style and named it – with commercial views - „Fabulous journeys“(...).
The editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, realizing the great talent of Jules Verne, convinced him to sign a contract for a 20 years old period, that established that the author were to write two books a year in exchange of 10.000 Francs. Due to this contract, Jules was able to dedicate entirely to writing.

Literary activity

1863   Cinq Semaines en ballon (Five weeks in a balloon) - 1 volume

• 1863-01-31: Cinq Semaines en ballon. Voyage de découvertes en Afrique par trois Anglais. Rédigé sur les notes du docteur Fergusson – Juanuary 31th 1863 (complete title „ Five weeks in a balloon. Voyage of three English explorers with the view to discover Africa. Written starting from the notes of doctor Fergusson”)
• Cinq Semaines en ballon. Voyages des découvertes en Afrique par trois Anglais
• 1865-12-05: first illustrated edition (51 illustrations - Riou and De Montaut)

1864-06-07   Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (The adventures of Captain Hatteras ) - 2 volumes

• Les Anglais au pôle Nord. Le désert de glace, Magasin,
  1864-03-20: Vol. 1, no. 1
  1865-12-05: Vol. 4, no. 42
  
• 1866-05-04: Les Anglais au pôle Nord. Voyages du capitaine Hatteras - Part I
• 1866-05-04: Le Désert de glace. Aventures du capitaine Hatteras - Part II
• 1866-11-26: Voyages et Aventures du capitaine Hatteras. Les Anglais au pôle Nord. Le Désert de glace (259 ilustraţii - Montaut) (complete title „The voyage and the adventures of captain Hatteras. The Englishmen at the North Pole. The desert of ice”).

1864-11-25   Short after his first book, Jules Verne published „Journey to the center of the Earth”, book that were to attract a great share of success. Jules Verne is the author whose books were most transposed into movies in history - over 200 de movies were based on his books.
Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the center of the Earth) - 1 volume

• 1864-11-25: Voyage au centre de la Terre
• 1867-05-13: first illustrated edition (56 ilustrations byRiou)
• 1867-08-22: second double volume with Voyage au Centre de la Terre (78 ilustrations - Riou and de Montaut) („Journey to the center of the Earth”)

1865-09-14   De la Terre à la Lune. Trajet direct en 97 heures; Journal des Débats politiques et littéraires

1865-10-25   De la Terre à la Lune. Trajet direct en 97 heures

1867-08-22   second double volume of Cinq semains en ballon
De la Terre à la Lune - 1 volume

1869   Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea)

1872-09-16   fifth double volume of Autour de la Lune (Around the Moon)

1873   Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days)

1874   His brother, Paul Verne, contributed to the 40th edition of the Mont-BlancFrench Festival, where he added the works of the collection of short stories of his brothers, Doctor Ox, in 1874.

The dusk of the life

1905-03-24   Jules Verne passed away at Amiens, on March 24th 1905, leaving behind a matchless heritage: over 65 novels, an extensive number of short stories and plays. As time went by, the books written by Jules Verne proved prophetical, his visionary spirit being far beyond the times in which he lived. He was buried in the Madeleine Cemetery in Amiens. There are recently initiated efforts to have him reburied in the Panthéon (2008), alongside France's other literary giants.
Together with H.G. Wells, Joules Verne is considered “the predecessor of the SF genre”. As time went by, all his works seemed real premonitions. One of the most precise was in the novel “From the Earth to the Moon”, where Verne predicted a space travel to the Moon with a racket launched from a base in Florida.
Other previsions were the advent of high-speed trains, the construction of sky-scrapers, fuel reaction based propelled automobiles and the emergence of personal computers. All in the novel „Paris in the 20th Century”, discovered by this great-grandson in 1989 and published in 1994.
Jules Verne remained, remains and will remain, the writer whose works were translated the most, into 148 languages, according to UNESCO statistics.
Jules Verne wrote numerous works, most famous of which are the 54 novels part of the Voyages Extraordinaires. He also wrote short stories, essays, plays, and poems.