Verne, Jules (vûrn; zhül vĕrn), 1828–1905, French novelist, originator of modern science fiction. After completing his studies at the Nantes lycée, he went to Paris to study law. He early became interested in the theater and wrote (1848–50) librettos for operettas. For some years his concerns alternated between business and the theater, but after 1863 he drew upon his interest in science and geography to write a series of romances of extraordinary journeys, in which he anticipated, with remarkable foresight, many scientific and technological achievements of the 20th cent.

Verne is especially known to English readers in translations of his Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), The Mysterious Island (1875), and Michael Strogoff (1876). Extremely popular, he wrote more than 50 books by the time he died. Plays and motion pictures have been made from many of his works, which are still widely read, particularly by the young. In 1989 the manuscript of Verne's long-lost 1863 novel Paris in the 20th Century was discovered; the pessimistic and prophetic futurist work was published in 1994.

Bibliography

See A. B. Evans, Jules Verne Rediscovered (1988).

Verne, Jules

(born Feb. 8, 1828, Nantes, France—died March 24, 1905, Amiens) French writer. He studied law then worked as a stockbroker while writing plays and stories. The first of his romantic adventures (voyages extraordinaires), Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), was highly successful. His subsequent voyages—with increasingly fantastic yet carefully conceived scientific wonders that often anticipated 20th-century technological achievements—include A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Verne's work shaped the entire development of science fiction.