The second-most-translated storyteller after Agatha Christie
Jules Verne (1828–1905) partnered with publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel on the Voyages extraordinaires—an 1864 descent toward Earth’s core, an 1870 submarine epic under seas, an 1872 race around the globe in eighty days—adventures wired to nineteenth-century science. Since 1979 only Christie outranks him in translations.
Jules Gabriel Verne was born 8 February 1828 on Île Feydeau in Nantes, at his grandmother’s house, to avoué Pierre Verne and Sophie Allotte de La Fuÿe of a navigator family. Boarding at six under Madame Sambin, widow of a vanished captain who she swore would return like Crusoe, stamped him with lifelong robinsonade motifs. At École Saint-Stanislas from 1836 he shone in mémoire, geography, Greek, Latin, and singing; a Loire vacation house at Chantenay fed river fascination recalled in 1890 memoirs. Family lore even claims an 1839 attempt to ship out as cabin boy on the Coralie before his father intercepted him at Paimbœuf.
Beyond the novels he wrote plays, stories, autobiography, poems, songs, and critical studies; adaptations span film from cinema’s birth through comics, opera, and games. In France and much of Europe he shaped avant-garde and surrealist reading; Anglophone markets long filed him as children’s or genre fare because of abridged, altered translations—a reputation recovering since the 1980s. Critics often group him with Wells and Gernsback as a founding science-fiction voice. By the 2010s no French novelist matched his translation tally; France marked the 2005 centenary of his death as Jules Verne Year.
Sent to Paris for law in 1847, he arrived amid the 1848 revolution while still dreaming of literature in Hugo’s shadow—finishing verse tragedies and drafting Un prêtre en 1839. Hetzel’s later series set tales in the later nineteenth century, folding known science and tech into globe-spanning plots. The Nantes childhood—castaway legends, Catholic schooling, Loire horizons—reads like a seedbed for Extraordinary Voyages that outlived their century in every major medium. Verne died 24 March 1905, leaving a shelf that still circles the planet faster than Phileas Fogg.
Source: Jules Verne
