Jules Gabriel Verne (ʒyl vɛʁn) (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his
adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of
science fiction.
Born to bourgeois parents in the seaport of Nantes, Verne was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His 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,
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and
Around the World in Eighty Days.
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. His reputation is markedly different in
Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a
children's author or a writer of
genre fiction, not least because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted.
Verne is the second most translated author in the world (following
Agatha Christie), and his works appear in more translations per year than those of any other writer. Verne is one writer sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction," as are
H. G. Wells and
Hugo Gernsback.