Education |
‘Around the World in 80 Days’ — JULES VERNE MINI-BIOGRAPHYJules Verne, one of the most widely read authors in the world, was born in 1828 in the port city of Nantes, France. He had four brothers and sisters, Paul, Anna, Mathilde, and Marie. The son of lawyer Pierre Verne and his wife Sophie, Verne grew up fascinated by the ships he saw in the Loire River and by tales of the sea. Excited with the prospect of seeing the world, Verne even tried to run away in 1839, at age 11, as a cabin boy on a ship bound for the West Indies. Before the ship made it out to the Atlantic Ocean, however, his father caught wind of the plan, and yanked young Jules from the ship. After finishing his secondary schooling, Verne headed to Paris to study law, the profession his father had chosen for him. While studying in Paris, Verne met distinguished writers such as Alexandre Dumas (fils) , and became interested in the theater. As Verne's interest in the theater grew, his interest in being a lawyer lessened. He turned his creative attention toward writing plays and short stories, but soon discovered he was less successful as a playwright than as a narrative author, having some of his short stories published in magazines. At about this time, Verne met his future wife, a widow with two daughters, Honorine Morel, whom he married in 1856. Verne felt he needed a more well-paying job to support his new wife and daughters, Valentine and Suzanne, and with the financial help of his father, became a partner in a stockbroker business. The newlywed Verne met the publisher and children's literature author, Jules Hetzel, to whom he submitted his full-length story Five Weeks in a Balloon, which to Verne's excitement Hetzel decided to publish. The partnership between Jules Hetzel and Jules Verne was to be a long and fruitful association. Verne trusted Hetzel’s artistic input into his stories, and publisher and author became lifelong friends as well as business associates. In 1861 Honorine gave birth to a son, Michel Verne, the only child they were to have together. Verne found it difficult having children in the house when trying to write, finding the interruptions and noise too distracting. Verne began spending more and more time writing alone on his boat which, though it distanced his family, proved fruitful artistically. Verne produced a huge output of work, writing one, sometimes two or more full-length books a year for over forty years. Verne's fiction became known for its imaginative prose without flowery excess, extraordinary scientific and geographic detail, clear, deep human emotion, and strong character objectives. In 1886 when Verne was 58 years old, one his nephews, Gaston, having developed a mental disorder, approached Jules outside his home with a gun, and opened fire. Verne was shot only in the foot, but the injury developed into a serious problem when doctors were unable to remove the bullet. The wound wouldn't heal properly and the gunshot affected Verne's gait for the rest of his life, giving him a significant limp. On top of that, Verne suffered from diabetes and constant dizziness. He died in Amiens, France, in 1905 at age 77, succumbing to his diabetes. For forty years, Verne proved an internationally popular author whose works were translated into almost every language on Earth. His writing was straightforward and unadorned. He created excitement by piling on detail after detail, succeeding in creating an atmosphere of wonder and intensity. Verne's popularity waned at the very end of the nineteenth century as many of the industrial wonders Verne's novels imagined, became more and more realized in everyday life. Verne left behind a legacy of rich, fascinating tales of human cleverness and intelligence, and unparalleled imagination that inspired scientists and adventurers to look for new ways of thinking about our world and our place in it. NOVELS BY JULES VERNE 1863 – Five Weeks in a Balloon Published Posthumously: The Golden Volcano |