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"One of the best storytellers who ever lived." - Arthur C. Clarke
In one dazzling decade, French novelist Jules Verne took readers to places they'd never gone before - the age of dinosaurs - the undersea realm of Atlantis - the craters and crevices of the moon - and a whirlwind tour of the planet earth!
Though he penned his unforgettable yarns in French, Verne plunked big parts of them down in America. And he himself possessed an American sassiness, nerve, and sense of humor, so Americans have returned the compliment: we've released dozens of Hollywood films based on his astonishing tales, and we've created the USS Nautilus, the NASA space missions, and other technological triumphs that have turned Verne's visions into practical reality.
Here are Jules Verne's best-loved novels in one convenient omnibus volume, but with a huge difference. This book features new, accurate, accessible, and unabridged translations of these five visionary classics, translations that are complete down to the smallest substantive detail, that showcase Verne's farseeing science with unprecedented clarity, and that capture the wit, prankishness, and showbiz flamboyance of one of literature's leading humorists and satirists. This is a Verne almost completely unknown to Americans - yet a Verne who has an uncannily American mind-set.
So these heroes and happenings are part of our heritage: Phileas Fogg chugging across the wild, wild west - the impossible underground journey of Professor Lidenbrock - the deep-sea exploits of secretive Captain Nemo - and a moon shot so realistic, it inspired U.S. astronaut Frank Borman a full century later.
Jules Verne was a science buff with a showbiz background, and finally these classic stories have a translator with the same orientation: Frederick Paul Walter is one of America's foremost Verne scholars - But he's also a scriptwriter, broadcaster, and part-time fossil hunter.
Enriched with dozens of classic illustrations, Amazing Journeys will be a family favorite in every home library.
Jules Verne was born in 1828 into a French lawyering family in the Atlantic coastal city of Nantes. Though his father sent him off to a Paris law school, young Jules had been writing on the side since his early teens, and his pet topics were the theater, travel, and science. Predictably enough, his legal studies led nowhere, so Verne took a day job with a stock brokerage, in his off-hours penning scripts for farces and musical comedies while also publishing short stories and novelettes of scientific exploration and adventure.
His big breakthrough came when he combined his theatrical knack with his scientific bent and in 1863 published an African adventure yarn, Five Weeks in a Balloon. After that and until his death in 1905, Jules Verne was one of the planet's best-loved and best-selling novelists, publishing more than sixty books. Other imaginative favorites by him include The Mysterious Island, Hector Servadac, The Begum's Millions, Master of the World, and The Meteor Hunt. Verne ranks among the five most translated authors in history, along with Mark Twain and the Bible.
Frederick Paul Walter is a scriptwriter, broadcaster, librarian, and amateur paleontologist. A long-standing member of the North American Jules Verne Society, he served as its vice president from 2000 to 2008. Walter has produced many media programs, articles, reviews, and papers on aspects of Jules Verne and has collaborated on translations and scholarly editions of three Verne novels: The Meteor Hunt, The Mighty Orinoco, and a special edition of 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas for the U.S. Naval Institute in Annapolis. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
After completing secondary school, Jules studied law in Paris, as his father had before him. However, during the two years he spent earning his degree, he developed more consuming interests. Through family connections, he entered Parisian literary circles and met many of the distinguished writers of the day. Inspired in particular by novelists Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas (father and son), Verne began writing his own works. His poetry, plays, and short fiction achieved moderate success, and in 1852 he became secretary of the Théâtre lyrique. In 1857 he married Honorine Morel, a young widow with two children. Seeking greater financial security, he took a position as a stockbroker with the Paris firm Eggly and Company. However, he reserved his mornings for writing. Baudelaire's recently published French translation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as the days Verne spent researching points of science in the library, inspired him to write a new sort of novel: the roman scientifique. His first such novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, was an immediate success and earned him a publishing contract with the important editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel.
For the rest of his life, Verne published an average of two novels a year; the fifty-four volumes published during his lifetime, collectively known as Voyages Extraordinaires, include his best-known works, Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Begun in 1865 and published to huge success in 1869, Twenty Thousand Leagues has been translated into 147 languages and adapted into dozens of films. The novel also holds the distinction of describing a submarine twenty-five years before one was actually constructed. As a tribute to Verne, the first electric and nuclear submarines were named Nautilus. In 1872 Verne settled in Amiens with his family. During the next several years he traveled extensively on his yachts, visiting such locales as North Africa, Gibraltar, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1886 Verne's mentally ill nephew shot him in the leg, and the author was lame thereafter. This incident, as well as the tumultuous political climate in Europe, marked a change in Verne's perspective on science, exploration, and industry. Although not as popular as his early novels, Verne's later works are in many ways as prescient. Touching on such subjects as the ill effects of the oil industry, the negative influence of missionaries in the South Seas, and the extinction of animal species, they speak to concerns that remain urgent in our own time.
Verne continued writing actively throughout his life, despite failing health, the loss of family members, and financial troubles. At his death in 1905 his desk drawers contained the manuscripts of several new novels. Jules Verne is buried in the Madeleine Cemetery in Amiens.
Author biography from the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
When Verne's father found out that his son would rather write than study law, he cut him off financially, and Jules was forced to support himself as a stockbroker -- a job he hated but was fairly good at. During this period, he sought advice and inspiration from authors Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo.
Verne stands as the most translated novelist in the world -- 148 languages, according to UNESCO statistics.
Overview
"One of the best storytellers who ever lived." - Arthur C. Clarke
In one dazzling decade, French novelist Jules Verne took readers to places they'd never gone before - the age of dinosaurs - the undersea realm of ...