Jules Gabriel Verne (/vɜːrn/;[1][2] French: [ʒyl gabʁjɛl vɛʁn]; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright.
Verne’s collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).
Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism.[3] His reputation was markedly different in Anglophone regions where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children’s books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed (until the 1980s, when his “literary reputation … began to improve”).[4]
Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare.[5] He has sometimes been called the “Father of Science Fiction”, a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback.[6]
Verne’s largest body of work is the Voyages extraordinaires series, which includes all of his novels except for the two rejected manuscripts Paris in the Twentieth Century and Backwards to Britain (published posthumously in 1994 and 1989, respectively) and for projects left unfinished at his death (many of which would be posthumously adapted or rewritten for publication by his son Michel).[87] Verne also wrote many plays, poems, song texts, operetta libretti, and short stories, as well as a variety of essays and miscellaneous non-fiction.
