Biographie de Jules Verne
Jules Verne, inventor of science fiction, was born in Nantes in 1828. He was a thirty-four-year-old litterateur with no prospects when, in 1862, he approached the publisher Hetzel with a bizarre manuscript about a balloon trip in Africa. In 1863, Five Weeks in a Balloon was published in an edition of 76,000, and Verne's fortune was made. Other fantastic voyages followed, and, by the time of his death in 1905, Jules Verne was a household name throughout the western world.