Jules Verne was born on February 8, 1828, in the city of Nantes,
France . He is best known for his novels A Journey to the Centre of
the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious
Island and Around the World in Eighty Days. Verne is often referred
to as the 'Father of science fiction' because he wrote about space,
air and underwater travel before aeroplanes, spacecrafts and
submarines were invented. He died in 1905.
Jules Verne (1828 - 1905) lived and died in France but developed an
early passion for travel. When he was eleven years old he tried,
unsuccessfully, to run away to sea. He returned home and promised
his mother that in future he would imagine travelling - this proved
to be a prophetic remark.
In the early 1860s, a magazine manager liked one of his adventure
stories and gave him a contract to write similar stories for the
next twenty years! The collected stories became known as Verne's
Voyages Extraordinaires. His stories were of fantastic adventures
with a degree of realism in the descriptions of events and
scientific content - he was a pioneer of science fiction. He did
lots of research for his books but occasionally made up a
scientific 'fact' if it suited the story. History has shown that he
had an incredible sense of what was possible - his imagined
inventions have often turned out to be close to later real
inventions.
His most famous story, Around the World in Eighty Days, is more
realistic than much of his work as it's set in a real rather than a
possible world. The story was based on the travels of an eccentric
man from Boston, called George Frances Tain, who set out to do
exactly what the title suggested. The books famous hero, Phileas
Fogg, was named after a travel writer of the time, William Parry
Fogg. The hilarious adventures of Phileas Fogg and his servant
Paspartout, owe everything to Verne's imagination. The book is
still popular and sales were boosted at the end of the twentieth
century when Michael Palin undertook the journey using only the
transport that would have been available to Fogg - he was
accompanied by a team of TV cameramen!
Jules Verne suffered much pain in later life from a leg wound
caused when a nephew went mad and shot him. He died of old age, the
author of such classics as A Journey to the Centre of the Earth and
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
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