Jules Verne

Fifty-odd novels. A theatre career he would not quit. A stock-exchange job he used as cover. He did not write one wager around the world. He spent decades on the Extraordinary Voyages: balloons, a cannon to the moon, captains who will not surface, a courier across Siberia, a Paris of the future his publisher buried. He researched like a clerk and plotted like a showman. After the shot in the leg, the machines keep running. The men inside them do not always deserve them. If you only know the eighty days, you have met the timetable. You have not met the author.