Biography exploratory jules verne

Lottman explores the dark, private side of the visionary who created some of the most imaginative tales of space, sea, and air travel ever written.
Herbert R. Lottman reveals Jules Verne, the pioneer of the science fiction genre and the uncannily accurate forecaster of twentieth-century invention, in an.
He majored in English and biology at the University of New York, graduating in 1948 and earned a master's in English from Columbia in 1951.

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The Incandescent Dreams of Jules Verne : JULES VERNE: An Exploratory Biography By Herbert R. Lottman; St. Martin’s Press: 360 pp., $26.95

Shortly before he died, Jules Verne (1828-1905) boasted that he was working on his hundredth book. If that’s how many he wrote, and it all depends on how you count, I must have devoured at least a third of them before my 15th birthday. So had Theodore Roosevelt, Kaiser William II and millions the world over. School libraries in France and elsewhere stored scores of the writer’s books; so did the memory of adults like Andre Gide and H.G. Wells. When, in the mid-1920s, the most intelligent man in France, Paul Valery, contemplated what he called a true history of reading, a survey of books most truly read, Jules Verne headed his list. That was also when, in the United States, Verne-inspired Hugo Gernsback launched a pulp magazine called Amazing Stories, “the magazine of scientification,” that presented sci-fi as a distinct literary species. Capt. Hatteras and Capt. Nemo, the ominous Nautilus, the moon launcher Columbiad and Robur’s “The Clipper of

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Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography

Drawing on previously unpublished letters and papers, Herbert R. Lottman reveals Jules Verne, the pioneer of the science fiction genre and the uncannily accurate forecaster of twentieth-century invention, in an entirely new light. In this groundbreaking biography, Lottman explores the dark, private side of the visionary writer. In his long-lost novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century (published in France in 1994, and in the United States in early 1997), Verne predicted a world filled with both technological achievements and monstrosities: cars, fax machines, synthesizers, computers, mass transit, and the electric chair. With uncharacteristic mistrust, Verne simultaneously marveled at the inventions and despaired at what drove people to create them. It is this elusive, disillusioned aspect of Verne that Herbert Lottman captures here. Tracing Verne's life from his childhood in Nantes to his self-imposed exile outside of Paris as an adult, Lottman sketches a vivid portrait of the man. Lottman brings to light for the first time Verne's secret s