Jules Verne BiographyBorn: February 8, 1828
Nantes, France
Died: March 24, 1905
Amiens, France The French novelist Jules Verne was the first authentic writer of modern science fiction. The best of his works, such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, are characterized by his intelligent foresight into the technical achievements that are within man's grasp. Jules Gabriel Verne was born on February 8, 1828, in Nantes, France, the eldest son of a prosperous lawyer, Pierre Verne, and his wife Sophie. Raised in a middle-class family, Jules despised his parents' constant drive to achieve middle-class respectability. Always rebellious but unsuccessful, Verne learned to escape into his own world of imagination. These feelings would show up in many of Verne's works as an adult. An otherwise uneventful childhood was marked by one major event. In his twelfth year, Jules worked as a cabin boy on an ocean-going ship. The ship was intercepted by his father before it went to sea, and Jules is said to have promised his parents that in the future he "would travel only in imagination"—a prediction fulfilled in a manner his parents could not have imagined. In 1847 Verne went to Paris, France, to study law, although privately he was already planning a literary career. Owing to the friendship he made with French author Alexandre Dumas the Elder (1802–1870), Verne's first play, Broken Straws, was produced—with some success—in 1850. From 1852 to 1855 he held a steady and low-paying  Jules Verne. position as secretary of a Paris theater, the Théâtre Lyrique. He continued to write comedies and operettas and began contributing short stories to a popular magazine, Le Musée des familles.During a visit to Amiens, France, in May 1856, Verne met and fell in love with the widowed daughter of an army officer, Madame Morel (née Honorine de Viane), whom he married the following January. The circumstance that his wife's brother was a stockbroker may have influenced Verne in making the unexpected decision to embrace this profession. Membership in the Paris Exchange did not seriously interfere with his literary labors, however, because he adopted a rigorous timetable, rising at five o'clock in order to put in several hours researching and writing before beginning his day's work at the
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