Around the World in Eighty Days, published originally as a newspaper serial in 1872 and released as a book the following year was well received in both formats. Its hero, Phileas Fogg, is a leisured but taciturn Londoner of such mathematically precise habits that he has fired his servant for bringing him shaving water two degrees too cold. Over a game of cards, Fogg wagers twenty thousand pounds that he can travel around the world in eighty days or less. What follows is a headlong adventure full of trains, ships, elephants, and wind sledges, not to mention human sacrifice, duels, and Indian attacks. A successful combination of modern speed and period quaintness,
Around the World in Eighty Days has become a delightful, timeless, steam-driven classic.
About the author
Born in 1828,
Jules Verne dutifully followed the career track of an ordinary bourgeois Frenchman. However literary ambition soon took over and at the age of twenty he began publishing plays and short stories. In 1862 he teamed up with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel and the two men entered into one of the most fruitful relationships in literary history. Verne remains best known for
Journey to the Center of the Earth,
From the Earth to the Moon,
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and
The Mysterious Island. By the end of his life in 1905, Verne had published more than sixty books.
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