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The French novelist Jules Verne (1828-1905) was the first authentic
exponent of modern science fiction. The best of his work is characterized by
intelligent predictions of technical achievements actually within man's grasp at
the time Verne wrote. Jules Verne was born
on Feb. 8, 1828, at Nantes, the eldest son of a prosperous provincial lawyer. An
otherwise uneventful childhood was marked by one major escapade. In his twelfth
year, Jules shipped as a cabin boy on an ocean-going three-master. The ship was
intercepted by his father before it had put out to sea, and Jules is said to have
promised his parents that "in future he would travel only in imagination"--a
prediction fulfilled in a manner his parents could not have
foreseen.
 Career as a Playwright
- In 1847 Verne went to Paris to study law, although privately he was
already planning a literary career. Owing to the friendship he made with
Alexandre Dumas the Elder, Verne's first play, Broken Straws, was
produced--with some success--in 1850. From 1852 to 1855 he held a steady and
ill-paid position as secretary of a Paris theater, the Théâtre Lyrique. He
continued to write comedies and operettas and began contributing short stories
to a popular magazine, Le Musée des familles.
During a visit to Amiens in May 1856, Verne met and fell in love with the
widowed daughter of an army officer, Madame Morel (née Honorine de Viane), whom he
married the following January. The circumstance that his wife's brother was a
stockbroker may have influenced Verne in making the unexpected decision to embrace
this profession. Membership in the Paris Exchange did not seriously interfere with
his literary labors, however, because he adopted a rigorous timetable, rising at
five o'clock in order to put in several hours researching and writing before
beginning his day's work at the Bourse.
First Novels -
Verne's first long work of fiction, Five Weeks in a Balloon, took the
form of an account of a journey by air over Central Africa, at that time
largely unexplored. The book, published in January 1863, was an immediate
success. He then decided to retire from stockbroking and to devote himself
full time to authorship. His next few books were immensely successful at the
time and are still counted among the best he wrote. A Journey to the
Center of the Earth (1864) describes the adventures of a party of
explorers and scientists who descend the crater of an Icelandic volcano and
discover an underground world. The Adventures of Captain Hatteras
(1866) centers on an expedition to the North Pole (not actually reached by
Robert Peary until 1909). In From the Earth to the Moon
(1865) and its sequel, Round the Moon (1870), Verne describes how two
adventurous Americans--joined, naturally, by an equally intrepid
Frenchman--arrange to be fired in a hollow projectile from a gigantic cannon
that lifts them out of the earth's gravity field and takes them close to the
moon. Verne not only pictured the state of weightlessness his "astronauts"
experienced during their flight, but also he had the prescience to locate
their launching site in Florida.
Later Works - Verne
wrote his two masterpieces when he was in his 40s. Twenty Thousand
Leagues under the Sea (1870) relates the voyages of the submarine
Nautilus, built and commanded by the mysterious Capt. Nemo, one of the
literary figures in whom Verne incorporated many of his own character traits.
Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) is the story of a
successful wager made by a typically phlegmatic Englishman, Phineas Fogg, a
character said to have been modeled on Verne's father, who had a mania for
punctuality. Other popular novels include The Mysterious Island
(1875) and Michael Strogoff (1876). Verne's total literary output
comprised nearly 80 books, but many of them are of little value or interest
today. One noteworthy feature of all his work is its moral idealism, which
earned him in 1884 the personal congratulations of Pope Leo XIII. "If I am not
always what I ought to be," Verne once wrote, "my characters will be what I
should like to be." His interest in scientific progress was tempered by his
robust religious faith, and in some of his later novels (such as The
Purchase of the North Pole, 1889), he showed himself aware of the social
dangers of uncontrolled technological advance.
Verne the Man -
Verne's personality was complex. Though capable of bouts of extreme liveliness
and given to punning and playing practical jokes, he was fundamentally a shy
man, happiest when alone in his study or when sailing the English Channel in a
converted fishing smack. In 1886 he was the victim of a shooting affray, which
left him lame. His assailant proved to be a nephew who was suffering from an
attack of persecution mania. This incident served to reinforce Verne's natural
tendency to melancholy. Although he stood successfully for election to the
city council of Amiens two years later, he spent his old age in close
retirement. In 1902 he became partially blind; he died on March 24, 1905.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Jules
Verne - Generator - Biography
