Jules Verne Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

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Occup.	Author
From	France
Born	February 8, 1828
Died	March 24, 1905
Aged	77 years

Early Life and Education
Jules Verne was born in Nantes, France, on February 8, 1828, the eldest child of Pierre Verne, an attorney, and Sophie Allote de la Fuye. The busy Atlantic port, with its shipyards and river traffic, fed his early imagination with visions of long voyages and distant lands. He studied at local schools and showed early talent in literature, writing verses and short pieces while absorbing geography and popular science with unusual zeal. Following his fathers wishes, he went to Paris to study law, earning degrees that would have permitted him to enter the family practice. Yet even during his legal studies he spent more time in libraries and theaters than in courtrooms, laying foundations for a life in letters that his father initially opposed.

Paris and the Stage
In Paris in the late 1840s and early 1850s, Verne entered the literary world through the theater. He wrote comedies and librettos and formed important friendships, notably with the composer Aristide Hignard, for whom he crafted lyrics and scenarios, and with the celebrated men of letters Alexandre Dumas pere and Alexandre Dumas fils, who encouraged his stage ambitions. The theater gave him craft discipline: concise scenes, snappy dialogue, and a feel for public tastes. Nonetheless, he needed regular income and, for a time, worked as a stockbroker, balancing financial stability with relentless reading in science, geography, and exploration narratives that would shape his future prose.

Hetzel and the Voyages Extraordinaires
Verne found his decisive patron in the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Their partnership began in the early 1860s with Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon) and soon expanded into the celebrated series Voyages extraordinaires, designed, as Hetzel framed it, to entertain while educating readers about the scientific and geographical knowledge of the age. Hetzel was more than a publisher; he was a demanding editor who guided tone, moral outlook, and narrative clarity. He famously rejected Verne's early dystopia Paris in the Twentieth Century as too bleak, a manuscript that would not see print until the late twentieth century. The Hetzel-Verne collaboration married meticulous editorial standards to Verne's appetite for discovery, producing books that reached a vast public.

Method, Research, and Illustrations
Verne did not invent his marvels from thin air. He immersed himself in travelogues, scientific journals, and proceedings of geographical societies, taking careful notes that he transformed into plots. Under Hetzels imprint, the novels appeared with abundant engravings by artists such as Edouard Riou, Alphonse de Neuville, and Leon Benett, which fixed images of submarines, airships, and volcanic caverns in the popular imagination. Verne's careful exposition and the visual program of his publishers house worked together, giving readers both instruction and wonder.

Travel and the Sea
Sail and steam were central to Verne's life and art. He purchased yachts he named Saint-Michel and cruised coastal waters and European seas, experiences that generated nautical precision in novels and short works. A transatlantic voyage aboard the Great Eastern in 1867 brought him to the Americas and inspired A Floating City. Even when he imagined subterranean or lunar voyages, his narratives were governed by the logic of navigation, logistics, instruments, and crew dynamics, reflecting a lifelong respect for practical engineering and seamanship. He admired contemporary innovators and aerial experimenters, and his friendship with the photographer and aeronaut Nadar informed his depictions of ballooning and dreams of heavier-than-air flight.

Family and Personal Relationships
In 1857 Verne married Honorine de Viane Morel, a widow with two daughters, and later became father to his only biological child, Michel Verne. Family life brought stability but also obligations that kept him tethered to paid work even as his fame rose. His younger brother, Paul Verne, a sailor, shared his fascination with the sea and occasionally accompanied him, contributing to the authenticity of maritime scenes. The figure who most shaped his career remained Hetzel, whose blend of paternal guidance and editorial rigor set boundaries that both protected and constrained Verne's imagination. In the 1870s Verne successfully collaborated with the dramatist Adolphe d'Ennery to adapt Around the World in Eighty Days for the stage, sealing his popular success across media.

Public Life in Amiens
After establishing himself, Verne settled in Amiens, Honorines native city, where he became a civic figure. He served on the municipal council for many years, concerned with cultural institutions and urban improvements. The city offered him relative quiet for work and a circle of local scholars and professionals through the Academie dAmiens. Though he never entered the Academie francaise, he pursued recognition as a serious man of letters and took pride in the pedagogical mission of his fiction.

Crises, Health, and the Turn in Tone
In 1886 Verne endured a traumatic event when his nephew Gaston shot him, injuring his leg and leaving him with a limp. The same year, Hetzel died, and Verne's guiding editor was gone. These blows coincided with the onset of visual troubles and later illnesses, including diabetes. The tone of his writing grew more somber and skeptical about the unalloyed benefits of technological progress. Novels such as Robur the Conqueror and later Master of the World imagine mastery of air and land, yet they question authority, fanaticism, and the costs of unchecked invention. The buoyant optimism of earlier tales shades into caution, even foreboding, without abandoning the empirical curiosity that defined his method.

Major Works and Themes
Verne's early triumphs include Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth), De la Terre a la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon) and its sequel Around the Moon, Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (In Search of the Castaways), and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas), which introduced the enigmatic Captain Nemo and the submarine Nautilus. Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days) captured a world linked by steam and cable, turning timetables into suspense. He followed with explorations of Siberia and Central Asia in Michel Strogoff, of colonial utopias in The Begums Millions, of comets, polar regions, and automata in Off on a Comet, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, and The Steam House. Across these works, he balanced pedagogy with adventure: digressions on geology, astronomy, and ethnography interlace with chases and escapes. His imagination often leaned on the near-future plausibility of devices, derived from contemporary science rather than magical leaps, making him a foundational figure for science fiction as later defined.

Later Years, Death, and Posthumous Publications
In his final decades Verne continued to publish regularly, even as illness slowed him and cataracts narrowed his sight. He relied more on dictation and careful revision. He died in Amiens on March 24, 1905. After his death, his son Michel Verne prepared and revised several manuscripts for publication, sometimes altering pacing and technological emphasis, decisions that later scholars have debated. The discovery and publication in the 1990s of Paris in the Twentieth Century, long thought lost after Hetzels rejection, renewed interest in Verne's darker speculative impulses and broadened the picture of his range.

Influence and Legacy
Verne's legacy extends far beyond literature into the worlds of engineering, exploration, and popular culture. Early admirers and adapters in theater and illustration helped fix the look and feel of his inventions, while later translators and filmmakers spread his narratives globally. He inspired generations of readers who became scientists, navigators, and aviators, demonstrating how story can recruit imagination to the cause of knowledge. The constellation of people around him shaped that legacy: Pierre-Jules Hetzel refined it; illustrators such as Edouard Riou and Leon Benett gave it form; collaborators like Adolphe d'Ennery extended it to the stage; friends like Nadar kept it in dialogue with experimentation; family members, from his wife Honorine to his son Michel, safeguarded and, at times, transformed it. Rooted in the nineteenth century yet constantly renewed, Jules Verne remains a writer whose curiosity, discipline, and humane skepticism continue to navigate readers through the promises and perils of modernity.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by Jules, under the main topics: Wisdom - Freedom - Nature - Science - Cat.

Other people realated to Jules: H.G. Wells (Author), Ray Bradbury (Writer), Nellie Bly (Journalist), Gavin Bryars (Composer), Julio Cortazar (Writer), Michael Todd (Producer), Alberto Santos Dumont (Aviator), Mike Todd (Producer)

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