Jules Verne, born at Nantes, France, in 1828, of legal and seafaring stock, was the author of innumerable adventure stories that combined a vivid imagination with a gift for popularizing science. Although he studied law at Paris, he devoted his life entirely to writing. His most popular stories, besides 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870), include: Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), A Trip to the Moon (1865), Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), and Michael Strogoff (1876). In addition, he was the author of a number of successful plays, as well as a p...