Jules Verne: The Biography

De: William Butcher

Narrado por: Simon Vance

From the established expert on the subject comes this new biography of one of the world's most successful writers. Breath-taking in scope, and full of the kind of revelations sure to cause press and controversy, Butcher combines existing and new research on Verne's life with the evidence from Verne's works to explore what sort of man Jules Verne was, how he achieved what he did, what went on inside his head, what really made him tick.

Butcher examines the forgotten nitty-gritty of Verne's life: his appearance, his schoolmates, the size of his bedroom, who he talked to and slept with, who he fell out with and was sued by, the fibs he told, how he got to work, how much he made, what he did on his days off, where he went, what he studied, what he read, whether he was a good husband and father - in sum, all the behavior that points to personality, as only a family member can know it.

©2020 William Butcher (P)2020 Oasis Audio

Outstanding

You may think you know Jules Verne; but unless you've been following William Butcher's decades-long comparison of Verne's original manuscripts to what was actually printed in Verne's name, you've missed the best part of the story. Simon Vance does his usual outstanding job narrating this meticulously researched and fascinating biography. Verne was NOT the father of science fiction; he was the father of the geographical adventure story. Unfortunately, his own publisher pigeonholed him as a Young Adult author and cut and rewrote some of Verne's best writing. (One of the publisher's most bizarre restrictions was that Verne was not allowed to write anything about France, lest someone in the audience be inadvertently offended.) In English, Verne's reputation was further damaged by translations that were hack jobs that cut and rewrote the texts that had already been cut and rewritten in French. If you want to see Verne at work, and see what he was really trying to accomplish, listen to this audiobook. This revised edition of the biography includes a new chapter summarizing the manuscript evidence.