Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free

sequel to Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is published. Flagging health plagues Verne. His brother Paul dies. English writer Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous and Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac are published.
1899
Verne’s Le testament d‘un excentrique (The Will of an Eccentric) deals with the oil industry’s ravages of the environment.
1905
Leaving a drawer filled with manuscripts, and with his fam- ily gathered at his bedside, Jules Verne dies of complications from diabetes. He is buried in Madeleine Cemetery in Amiens. His posthumously published novels, altered considerably by his son, Michel, remain a source of scholarly debate and interest.

Introduction
    The book you hold in your hands is considered by many Jules Verne readers to be his masterpiece. Serialized in a widely read French family magazine in 1869 and 1870 and published in two volumes in those same years, it was Verne’s seventh successful novel. As is true of much of his fiction, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Verne capitalized on the spirit of the time, incorporating up-to-the-minute scientific data in a pulse-quickening adventure plot. Verne’s mission as a novelist, he wrote, was to “depict in novel format the entire Earth, the whole world, by imagining adventures unique to each country and by inventing characters indigenous to the habitats in which they live” (quoted in Evans, Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel, p. 30; see “For Further Reading”). By all accounts, he succeeded, originating a fictional genre, writing in a voice at once unique and universal, and for forty years feeding his devoted readers a steady diet of extraordinary fiction based on scientific fact.
    France had never seen anything like Verne. His readers touted him as a genius, a soothsayer, a visionary. His fourth book, From the Earth to the Moon, was so popular it elicited requests from single French women wishing to accompany Verne to the lunar landscape in his new space-going vessel. “Parisians are certainly brave,” Verne wrote in a letter after publication of that book. “Some of them are determined by hook or crook to embark on my projectile” (quoted in Teeters, Jules Verne: The Man Who Invented Tomorrow, p. 62). His reputation grew, and his works were reportedly translated into more languages than Shakespeare’s plays. “Take a young English boy and put half of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in his hand, in translation; then give him the other half in French; and that boy will figure out a way to try to understand,” said British author and Verne enthusiast Rudyard Kipling (quoted in Lynch, Jules Verne, p. 112). Verne never let his readers down, publishing more than sixty novels and some twenty short stories, as well as a few dozen plays. Even one hundred years after his death, a new generation of Verne fans can see his plots through Disney’s lens. His enduring popularity is a testament to the human appetite for fantasies brought to life.
    Among Verne’s mountain of novels collectively known as Extraordinary Voyages, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea stands out. In it, Verne used techniques he perfected in his previous books. Near-death beneath the ice caps and strangulation in the tentacles of giant squids made his readers squirm in their armchairs, while observation windows and an encyclopedia-toting sidekick educated as they entertained. At times remarkably lyrical, at other times strictly scientific, Verne’s writing took readers places they had never gone before—indeed, to places few of them had even imagined. But unlike in his other novels, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea he did more than paint a realistic picture of an unreal voyage. The book is Verne’s masterpiece not for the wonders of the sea he describes, but for the realistic creation of a singular man. It’s Captain Nemo, to the maelstrom and to the end.
    In his other books, Verne’s