Book Synopsis
Jules Verne (1828 – 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including "Journey to the Center of the Earth", "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", and "Around the World in Eighty Days". He is generally considered a major literary author in most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in anglophone regions where he has 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. The Voyages Extraordinaires series continued for several years afterwards at the same rate of two volumes a year. It was later discovered that Michel Verne had made extensive changes in these stories, and the original versions were eventually published at the end of the 20th century by the Jules Verne Society (Société Jules Verne). In 1989, Verne's great-grandson discovered his ancestor's as-yet-unpublished novel "Paris in the Twentieth Century," which was subsequently published in 1994.