Jules Verne

Jules Verne (1828–1905) was a French novelist, born in Nantes, who was sent to Paris to study law and stayed to write plays until the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel took Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1863 and signed him to a lifelong contract. The Voyages extraordinaires that followed, more than sixty novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days, combined geography, engineering and adventure and made him one of the most translated authors in the world. He served as a town councillor in Amiens and was shot in the leg by a deranged nephew in 1886.