French Literature · 66 books
Jules Verne was born on February 8, 1828, on the Île Feydeau, a small island in the Loire river within the city of Nantes, France, and died on March 24, 1905, in Amiens. In the intervening decades he produced more than sixty novels under the series title Voyages extraordinaires — a body of work that invented, or nearly invented, the genre of popular science fiction, and that has remained continuously in print in more languages than almost any other author in history. He is one of the most translated writers who ever lived.
His father, Pierre Verne, was a lawyer who expected his eldest son to follow him into the profession. Jules moved to Paris to study law, completed his studies, and then pivoted entirely toward the theater, writing vaudeville plays and libretti. He did not tell his father for some time. His early years in Paris were financially precarious; he worked as a stockbroker’s assistant while pursuing a literary career on the side, and formed friendships with figures in the city’s theatrical and literary circles. He met Alexandre Dumas, who encouraged him and whose narrative energy was a clear influence on the work that followed.
The decisive development came through the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who in 1862 rejected an early manuscript but saw something in Verne’s combination of scientific enthusiasm and adventure storytelling. They reached an agreement, and what emerged from it — the Voyages extraordinaires — became one of the most commercially successful publishing relationships in nineteenth-century France. Over decades, Verne delivered manuscripts with remarkable regularity, two novels per year in some periods, and Hetzel edited them, sometimes extensively, toward their eventual form. The partnership lasted until Hetzel’s death in 1886 and continued with his son afterward.
The early novels established what remains the characteristic Verne mode: a journey into extreme or unknown territory, driven by a mixture of scientific ambition and narrative excitement, conducted by a cast of characters who debate, argue, and embody different philosophical temperaments. Five Weeks in a Balloon, published in 1863, sent explorers across Africa by air. Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864, sent a German professor and his companions into a volcanic shaft in Iceland and downward toward a prehistoric interior world. From the Earth to the Moon, 1865, calculated the physics of space travel with a precision that later commentators found prophetic. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870, introduced Captain Nemo — one of the great figures of nineteenth-century fiction, a man of genius and wounded pride who has withdrawn from the surface world entirely — and the submarine Nautilus, a vessel that became an archetype for imagined technologies from that point forward.
Verne was not simply producing fantasy. He was engaged in something more disciplined: he read scientific journals, corresponded with researchers, and built his extrapolations from a close reading of what was actually being discovered and theorized. He got many things wrong, and some things that appear prescient in retrospect were coincidences of imagination. But his commitment to grounding fiction in real scientific thinking was consistent, and it gave the books a texture that pure adventure stories lacked.
His range was wider than the science fiction label suggests. The Mysterious Island, published in 1874–75, is a sustained survival narrative set on a volcanic island in the Pacific. Around the World in Eighty Days, 1872, is a story about time, efficiency, and the mechanical compression of the globe. Michael Strogoff, 1876, is a courier adventure set in Russia. The books written after Hetzel’s death tend to be darker in tone: The Carpathian Castle, 1892, is almost Gothic; Propeller Island, 1895, is satirical; his later posthumously published works, edited by his son Michel, include material significantly altered from the manuscripts Verne left.
He settled in Amiens in 1871 with his wife, Honorine, and lived there quietly, far from Parisian literary society, working every morning with professional regularity. He served for several years on the Amiens municipal council. He suffered a gunshot wound to his left leg in 1886 when his nephew Gaston, suffering from a mental illness, shot him; he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
He died on March 24, 1905, and was buried in Amiens, where his grave is marked by a dramatic sculpture showing a young man rising from his tomb and gesturing toward the sky. He was seventy-seven years old and had been working on a manuscript to the end.
What makes Verne endure is not merely the anticipation of submarines and space travel — it is the quality of imagination that made such extrapolation possible. His characters are driven by curiosity that is also a kind of need: a refusal to accept the world’s current limits as permanent. That quality translates across cultural boundaries and across time, which is why children and adults in every decade since his death have found their way into his books and stayed.
His legacy in the literature of imagination is foundational. H. G. Wells, writing in the early twentieth century, was often compared with Verne, and Wells himself addressed the comparison: Verne’s method was to start from the real and extrapolate; Wells’s was to start from the impossible and make it consistent. The distinction is useful, but it should not diminish Verne’s achievement. His method — the careful extrapolation from actual science to imagined possibility — established a mode that the science fiction genre has never entirely left behind. When readers encounter submarines, space travel, or journeys to extreme environments in later fiction, they are in a tradition he helped create, through novels that were also, at their core, adventure stories about the appetite for knowledge and the consequences of satisfying it.
At Classics Retold, we have made an extensive selection of the Voyages extraordinaires available in new English translations — editions that bring Verne’s narrative energy and scientific enthusiasm into accessible modern prose. From his most celebrated adventures to lesser-known works that deserve a wider readership, these translations offer the full range of one of literature’s great explorers.
We’ve written more about his work here: Verne Mapped the Ocean Before We Reached It and Verne Buried a Political Manifesto in an Adventure Novel.
