Jules Verne

Trained in law and briefly working as a stockbroker, Verne wrote at night until the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel signed him to an exclusive, decades-long contract for a series he called the 'Voyages extraordinaires,' a sustained project imagining submarines, moon rockets, and polar expeditions years or decades before engineers built the real things.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) made him one of the most translated authors in the world in his lifetime. In 1886 his mentally ill nephew Gaston shot him in the leg, leaving him with a permanent limp; he spent his later years as a municipal councilor in Amiens, still producing new 'Voyages' almost yearly.

He died there in 1905, leaving several manuscripts to be published posthumously.