View Poster

(born Feb. 8, 1828, Nantes, France — died March 24, 1905, Amiens) French writer. He studied law then worked as a stockbroker while writing plays and stories. The first of his romantic adventures (voyages extraordinaires), Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), was highly successful. His subsequent voyages — with increasingly fantastic yet carefully conceived scientific wonders that often anticipated 20th-century technological achievements — include A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Verne's work shaped the entire development of science fiction.