⭐ Former Banking VP Issues Warning on These 110 Banks

𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘦𝘦, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘬𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘳𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘵 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘥𝘳𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘤 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘺 [Invest Knowledge Media]( Dear Reader, [If you use any of these 110 banks]( your money could be in trouble. You see, these banks have enrolled in a controversial pilot program that could have drastic implications for your money [Click here to see the details]( because I’m talking about banks like Chase, US Bank, Wells Fargo and Citigroup, just to mention a few. If your bank is on this list, you’ll need to move your cash before December 13th. [Click here to see why.]( Regards, [signature] Andrew Packer Analyst, Palm Beach Letter King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. His father, Donald Ed King, a travelling vacuum salesman after returning from World War II,[10] was born in Indiana with the sur Pollock, changing it to King as an adult.[11][12][13] King's mother was Nellie Ruth King (née Pillsbury).[13] His parents were married in Scarborough, Maine on July 23, 1939.[14] Shortly afterwards, they lived with Donald's family in Chicago before moving to Croton-on-Hudson, York.[15] King's parents returned to Maine towards the end of World War II, living in a modest house in Scarborough. When King was two, his father left the family. His mother raised him and his older brother David by herself, sometimes under strain. They moved from Scarborough and depended on relatives in Chicago; Croton-on-Hudson; West De Pere, Wisconsin; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Malden, Massachusetts; and Stratford, Connecticut.[15][17] When King was 11, his family moved to Durham, Maine, where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths. She then became a caregiver in a local residential facility for the menty chenged.[1] King was raised Methodist,[18][19] but lost his belief in organized religion while in high school. While no longer religious, he says he chooses to believe in the existence of God.[20] As a child, King apparently witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train, though he has no memory of the event. His family told him that after leaving to play with the boy, King returned speechless and seemingly in shock. later did the family learn of the death. Some commentators have suggested that this event may have psychologicy inspired some of King's darker works,[21] but King makes no mention of it in his memoir On Writing (2000). He related in detail his primary inspiration for writing horror fiction in his non-fiction Danse Macabre (1981), in a chapter titled "An Annoying Autobiographical Pause". He compared his uncle's dowsing for water using the bough of an apple branch with the sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living. That inspiration occurred while browsing through an attic with his elder brother, when King uncovered a paperback version of an H. P. Lovecraft collection of short stories he remembers as The Lurker in the Shadows, that had belonged to his father. King told Barnes & Noble Studios in a 2009 interview, "I k that I'd found when I read that book."[22] King attended Durham Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon High School (Maine) in Lisbon Fs, Maine, in 1966.[23] He displayed an early interest in horror as an avid reader of EC horror comics, including Tales from the Crypt, and he later paid tribute to the comics in his screenplay for Creepshow. He began writing for fun while in school, contributing articles to Dave's Rag, the spaper his brother published with a mimeograph machine, and later began selling stories to his friends based on movies he had seen. (He was forced to return the when it was discovered by his teachers.) The first of his stories to be independently published was "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber", which was serialized over four issues (three published and one unpublished) of a fanzine, Comics Review, in 1965. It was republished the follog year in revised, as "In a Half-World of Terror", in another fanzine, Stories of Suspense, edited by Marv Wolfman.[24] As a teen, King also a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.[25] King entered the University of Maine in 1966, and graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.[26] That year, his daughter Naomi Rachel was born. He wrote a column, Steve King's Garbage Truck, for the student spaper, The Maine Campus, and participated in a writing workshop organized by Burton Hatlen.[27] King held a variety of jobs to pay for his studies, including as a janitor, a gas-station attendant, and an industrial laundry worker. He met his, fellow student Tabitha Spruce, at the university's Raymond H. Fogler Library after one of Professor Hatlen's workshops; they wed in 1971.[27] Career Beginnings In 1971, King worked as a teacher at Hampden Academy. King sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor", to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967.[1] After graduating from the University of Maine, King earned a certificate to teach high school but, unable to find a teaching post, he supplemented his laboring wage by selling short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier. Many of these early stories were republished in the collection Night Shift. The short story "The Raft" was published in Adam, a men's magazine. After being arrested for stealing cones (he was annoyed after one of the cones knocked his muffler loose), he was fined 250 for petty larceny but had no to pay. However, a then arrived for "The Raft" (then titled "The Float"), and King cashed it to pay the fine.[28] In 1971, King was hired as a teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. He continued to contribute short stories to magazines and worked on ideas for novels.[1] During 1966–1970, he wrote a draft about his dystopian novel ced The Long Walk[29] and the anti-war novel Sword in the Darkness,[30][31] but neither of the works was published at the time; The Long Walk was later released in 1979. Carrie and aftermath In 1973, King's novel, Carrie, was accepted by publishing house, Doubleday. It was King's fourth novel,[32] but the first to be published. He wrote it on his Tabitha's portable typewriter. It began as a short story intended for Cavalier magazine, but King tossed the first three pages in the garbage can.[33] Tabitha recovered the pages and encouraged him to finish the story, saying she would help him with the female perspective; he followed her advice and expanded it into a novel.[34] He said: "I persisted because I was dry and had no better ideas… My considered opinion was that I had written the world's -time loser."[35] According to The Guardian, Carrie "is the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latent—and then, as the novel progresses, developing—telekinetic powers. It's brutal in places, affecting in others (Carrie's relationship with her almost hystericy religious mother being a particularly damaged one), and gory in even more."[36] When Carrie was chosen for publication, King's was out of service. Doubleday editor William Thompson—who became King's close—sent a telegram to King's house in late March or early April 1973[37] which read: "Carrie Officiy A Doubleday Book. 2,500 Advance Against Royalties. Congrats, Kid – The Future Lies Ahead, Bill."[38] King said he bought a Ford Pinto with the advance.[37] On May 13, 1973, American Library bought the paperback rights for 400,000, which—in accordance with King's contract with Doubleday—was split between them.[39][40] Carrie set King's career in motion and became a significant novel in the horror genre. In 1976, it was made into a successful horror film.[41] King's 'Salem's Lot was published in 1975. In a 1987 issue of The Highway Patrolman magazine, he said, "The story seems sort of down home to me. I have a special cold spot in my heart for it!"[42] After his mother's death, King and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he wrote The Shining (published 1977). The family returned to Auburn, Maine in 1975, where he completed The Stand (published 1978). In 1977, the family, with the addition of Owen Philip, his third and youngest child, traveled briefly to England. They returned to Maine that f, where King began teaching creative writing at the University of Maine.[43] In 1982, King published Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas with a more dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which he is famous.[44] It is notable for having three of its four novellas turned into Hollywood films: Stand by Me (1986) was adapted from The Body;[45] The Shawshank Redemption (1994) was adapted from Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption;[46] and Apt Pupil (1998) was adapted from the novella of the same .[47][48] In 1985, King wrote his first work for the comic book,[49] writing a few pages of the benefit X-Men comic book Heroes for Hope Starring the X-Men. The book, whose were donated to famine relief in Africa, was written by a number of different authors in the comic book field, such as Chris Claremont, Stan Lee, and Alan Moore, as well as authors not primarily associated with comics, such as Harlan Ellison.[50] The follog year, King published It (1986), which was t-selling hardcover novel in the United States that year,[51] and wrote the introduction to Batman No. 400, an anniversary issue where he expressed his preference for the character over Superman.[52][53] The Dark Tower books Main article: The Dark Tower (series) In the late 1970s, King began what became a series of interconnected stories about a lone gunslinger, Roland, who pursues the "Man in Black" in an alternate-reality universe that is a cross between J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth and the American Wild West as depicted by Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone in their spaghetti Westerns. The first of these stories, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, was initiy published in five instments by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under the editorship of Edward L. Ferman, from 1977 to 1981. The Gunslinger was continued as an eight-book epic series ced The Dark Tower, whose books King wrote and published infrequently over four decades (1978-2012).[54] Pseudonyms In the late 1970s and early 1980s, King published a handful of short novels—Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982) and Thinner (1984)—under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The idea behind this was to test whether he could replicate his again and to ay his fears that his popularity was an accident. An alternate explanation was that publishing standards at the time owed a single book a year.[55] He picked up the from the Canadian hard rock band Bachman–Turner Overdrive, of which he is a fan.[56] Richard Bachman was exposed as King's pseudonym by a persistent Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk, Steve Brown, who noticed siarities between the works and later located publisher's records at the Library of Congress that d King as the author of one of Bachman's novels.[57] This led to a press release heralding Bachman's "death"—supposedly from "cancer of the pseudonym".[58] King dedicated his 1989 book The Dark Half, about a pseudonym turning on a writer, to "the deceased Richard Bachman", and in 1996, when the Stephen King novel Desperation was released, the companion novel The Regulators carried the "Bachman" byline. In 2006, during a press conference in London, King declared that he had discovered another Bachman novel, titled Blaze. It was published on June 12, 2007. In fact, the original manuscript had been held at King's Alma mater, the University of Maine in Orono, for many years and had been covered by numerous King experts. King rewrote the original 1973 manuscript for its publication.[59] King has used other pseudonyms. The short story "The Fifth Quarter" was published under the pseudonym John Swithen (the of a character in the novel Carrie), by Cavalier in April 1972.[60] The story was reprinted in King's collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes in 1993 under his own . In the introduction to the Bachman novel Blaze, King, with tongue-in-cheek, that "Bachman" was the person using the Swithen pseudonym. The "children's book" Charlie the Choo-Choo: From the World of The Dark Tower was published in 2015 under the pseudonym Beryl Evans, who was portrayed by actress ison Davies during a book signing at San Diego Comic-Con,[61] and illustrated by Ned Dameron. It is adapted from a fictional book central to the plot of King's previous novel The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands.[62] Digital era Stephen King at the Harvard Book Store, June 6, 2005 In 2000, King published online a serialized horror novel, The Plant.[63] At first the public assumed that King had abandoned the project because were unsuccessful, but King later stated that he had simply run out of stories.[64] The unfinished epistolary novel is still available from King's official site, . Also in 2000, he wrote a digital novella, Riding the Bullet, and saying he foresaw e-books becoming 50 of the market "probably by 2013 and maybe by 2012". However, he also stated: "the thing—people tire of the toys quickly."[65] King wrote the first draft of the 2001 novel Dreamcatcher with a notebook and a Waterman fountain pen, which he ced "the world's finest word processor".[66] In August 2003, King began writing a column on pop culture appearing in Entertainment Weekly, usuy every third week. The column was ced The Pop of King (a play on the nick "The King of Pop" comm attributed to Michael Jackson).[67] In 2006, King published an apocalyptic novel, Cell. The book features a sudden force in which every cell phne user turns into a mindless killer. King noted in the book's introduction that he does not use cell phones.[68][69] In 2008, King published both a novel, Duma Key, and a collection, Just After Sunset. The latter featured 13 short stories, including a previously unpublished novella, N. Starting July 28, 2008, N. was released as a serialized animated series to lead up to the release of Just After Sunset.[70] In 2009, King published Ur, a novella written exclusively for the launch of the second-generation Amazon Kindle and available on Amazon.com, and Throttle, a novella co-written with his son Joe Hill and released later as an audiobook titled Road Rage, which included Richard Matheson's short story "Duel". King's novel Under the Dome was published on November 10 of that year; it is a reworking of an unfinished novel he tried writing twice in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and at 1,074 pages, it is the largest novel he has written since It (1986). Under the Dome debuted at No. 1 in The York Times Bestseller List.[71] On February 15, 2010, King announced on his Web site that his next book would be a collection of four previously unpublished novellas ced Full Dark, No Stars. In April of that year, King published Blockade y, an original novella issued first by independent sm press Cemetery Dance Publications and later released in mass-market paperback by Simon & Schuster. The follog month, DC Comics premiered American Vampire, a monthly comic book series written by King with short-story writer Scott Snyder, and illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque, which represents King's first original comics work.[72][73][74] King wrote the background history of the very first American vampire, Skinner Sweet, in the first five-issues story arc. Scott Snyder wrote the story of Pearl.[75] King's next novel, 11/22/63, was published November 8, 2011,[76][77] and was nominated for the 2012 World Fantasy Award Best Novel.[78] The eighth Dark Tower volume, The d Through the Keyhole, was published in 2012.[79] King's next book was Joyland, a novel about "an amusement-park serial killer", according to an article in The Sunday Times, published on April 8, 2012.[80] During his Chаncellor's Speaker Series talk at University of Massachusetts Lowell on December 7, 2012, King indicated that he was writing a crime novel about a retired policeman being taunted by a murderer. With a working title Mr. Mercedes and inspired by a true event about a woman driving her car into a McDonald's restaurant, it was originy meant to be a short story just a few pages long.[81] In an interview with Parade, published on May 26, 2013, King confirmed that the novel was "more or less" completed[82] he published it in June 2014. Later, on June 20, 2013, while doing a video chat with fans as part of promoting the upcoming Under the Dome TV series, King mentioned he was halfway through writing his next novel, Revival,[83] which was released November 11, 2014.[84] King announced in June 2014 that Mr. Mercedes is part of a trilogy; the second book, Finders Keepers, was released on June 2, 2015. On April 22, 2015, it was revealed that King was working on the third book of the trilogy, End of Watch, which was ultimately released on June 7, 2015.[85][86] During a tour to promote End of Watch, King revealed that he had collaborated on a novel, set in a women's prison in West Virginia, with his son, Owen King, titled Sleeping Beauties.[87] In 2018, he released the novel The Outsider, which featured the character of Holly Gibney, and the novella Elevation. In 2019, he released the novel The Institute. In 2020, King released If It Bleeds, a collection of four previously unpublished novellas. In 2022, King released his latest novel, Fairy Tale. Collaborations Writings King has written two novels with horror novelist Peter Straub: The Talisman (1984) and a sequel, Black House (2001). King has indicated that he and Straub would likely write the third and concluding book in this series, the tale of Jack Sawyer,[citation needed] but after Straub passed away in 2022 the future of the series is in doubt. King produced an artist's book with designer Barbara Kruger, My Pretty Pony (1989), published in a limted edition of 250 by the Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Alfred A. Knopf released it in a general trade edition.[88] The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My at Rose Red (2001) was a paperback tie-in for the King-penned miniseries Rose Red (2002). Published under anonymous authorship, the book was written by Ridley Pearson. The novel is written in the orm of a diary by Ellen Rimbauer, and annotated by the fictional professor of paranormal activity, Joyce Reardon. The novel also presents a fictional afterword by Ellen Rimbauer's grandson, Steven. Intended to be a promotional item rather than a stand-alone work, its popularity spawned a 2003 prequel television miniseries to Rose Red, titled The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer. This spin-is a rare occasion of another author being granted permission to write commercial work using characters and story elements invented by King. The novel tie-in idea was repeated on Stephen King's next project, the miniseries Kingdom Hospital. Richard Dooling, King's collaborator on Kingdom Hospital and writer of several episodes in the miniseries, published a fictional diary, The Journals of Eleanor Druse, in 2004. Eleanor Druse is a key character in Kingdom Hospital, much as Dr. Joyce Readon and Ellen Rimbauer are key characters in Rose Red.[citation needed] Throttle (2009), a novella written in collaboration with his son Joe Hill, appears in the anthology He Is Legend: Celebrating Richard Matheson.[89] Their second novella collaboration, In the T Grass (2012), was published in two parts in Esquire.[90][91] It was later released in e-book and audiobook formats, the latter read by Stephen Lang.[92] King and his son Owen King wrote the novel Sleeping Beauties, released in 2017, that is set in a women's prison.[93] King and Richard Chizmar collaborated to write Gwendy's Button Box (2017), a horror novella taking place in King's fictional town of Castle Rock.[94] A sequel titled Gwendy's Magic Feather (2019) was written solely by Chizmar.[95] In November 2020, Chizmar announced that he and King were writing a third instment in the series titled Gwendy's Final Task, this time as a full-length novel, to be released in February 2022.[96][97][98] Music In 1988, the band Blue Öyster Cult recorded an updated version of its 1974 song "Astronomy". The single released for radio play featured a narrative intro spoken by King.[99][100] The Blue Öyster Cult song "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was also used in the King TV series The Stand.[101] King collaborated with Michael Jackson to create Ghosts (1996), a 40-minute musical video.[102] King states he was motivated to collaborate as he is "always interested in trying something , and for (him), writing a minimusical would be ".[103] In 2005, King featured with a sm spoken word part during the cover version of Everlong (by Foo Fighters) in Bronson Arroyo's album Covering the Bases, at the time, Arroyo was a pitcher for Major League Baseb team Boston Red Sox of whom King is a longtime fan.[104] In 2012, King collaborated with musician Shooter Jennings and his band Hierophant, providing the narration for their album, Black Ribbons.[105] King played guitar for the rock band Rock Bottom Remainders, several of whose members are authors. Other members include Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Scott Turow, Amy Tan, James McBride, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount, Jr., Matt Groening, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Sam Barry, and Greg Iles. King and the other band members collaborated to release an e-book ced Hard Listening: The est Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells (June 2013).[106][107] King wrote a musical entitled Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2012) with musician John Mellencamp.[citation needed] Analysis Writing style and approach Stephen King in 2011 King's formula for learning to write well is: "Read and write four to six hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer." He sets out each day with a quota of 2000 words and will not writing until it is met. He also has a simple definition for talent in writing: "If you wrote something for which someone sent you a, if you cashed the and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the, I consider you talented."[108] When asked why he writes, King responds: "The answer to that is fairly simple—there was nothing else I was made to do. I was made to write stories and I love to write stories. That's why I do it. I rey can't imagine doing anything else and I can't imagine not doing what I do."[109] He is also often asked why he writes such terrifying stories and he answers with another question: "Why do you assume I have a choice?"[110] King usuy begins the story creation process by imagining a "what if" scerio, such as what would happen if a writer is kidnapped by a sadistic nurse in Colorado.[111] King often uses authors as characters, or includes mention of fictional books in his stories, novellas and novels, such as Paul Sheldon, who is the main character in Misery, adult Bill Denbrough in It, Ben Mears in 'Salem's Lot, and Jack Torrance in The Shining. He has extended this to breaking the fourth w by including himself as a character in The Dark Tower series from The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Ca onwards. In September 2009 it was announced he would serve as a writer for Fangoria.[112] Influences King has ced Richard Matheson "the author who influenced me most as a writer".[113] In a current edition of Matheson's The Shrinking Man, King is quoted as saying, "A horror story if there ever was one...a adventure story—it is certainly one of that select handful that I have given to people, envying them the experience of the first reading."[114] Other ackledged influences include H. P. Lovecraft,[115][115] Arthur Machen,[117] Ray Bradbury,[118] Joseph Payne Brennan,[119] Elmore Leonard,[120] John D. MacDonald, and Don Robertson.[121] King's The Shining is immersed in gothic influences, including "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar an Poe (which was directly influenced by the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto).[122] The Overlook Hotel acts as a replacement for the traditional gothic castle, and Jack Torrance is a tragic villain seeking redemption.[122] King's favorite books are (in ): The Golden Argosy; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Satanic Verses; McTeague; Lord of the Flies; Bleak House; Nineteen Eighty-Four; The Raj Quartet; Light in August; and Blood Meridian.[123] Critical response Science fiction editors John Clute and Peter Nicholls[124] a largely favorable appraisal of King, noting his "pungent prose, sharp ear for dialogue, disarmingly laid-back, frank style, along with his passionately fierce denunciation of stupidity and cruelty (especiy to children) [ of which rank] him among the more distinguished 'popular' writers." In his book The Philosophy of Horror (1990), Noël Carroll discusses King's work as an exemplar of modern horror fiction. Analyzing both the narrative structure of King's fiction and King's non-fiction ruminations on the art and craft of writing, Carroll writes that for King, "the horror story is always a contest between the normal and the abnormal such that the normal is reinstated and, therefore, affirmed."[125] In his analysis of post–World War II horror fiction, The Modern Weird Tale (2001), critic S. T. Joshi devotes a chapter to King's work. Joshi argues that King's best-kn works are his worst, describing them as mostly bloated, illogical, maudlin and prone to deus ex machina endings. Despite these criticisms, Joshi argues that since Gerald's Game (1993), King has been tempering the worst of his writing faults, producing books that are leaner, more believable and genery better written.[126] In 1996, King an O. Henry Award for his short story "The Man in the Black Suit".[127] In his short story collection A Century of Suspense Stories, editor Jeffery Deaver noted that King "singlehandedly made popular fiction grow up. While there were many good best-selling writers before him, King, more than anybody since John D. MacDonald, brought reality to genre novels. He has often remarked that 'Salem's Lot was "Peyton Place meets Dracula. And so it was. The rich characterization, the careful and caring social eye, the interplay of story line and character development announced that writers could take worn themes such as vampirism and make them fresh again. Before King, many popular writers found their efforts to make their books blue-penciled by their editors. 'Stuff like that gets in the way of the story,' they were told. Well, it's stuff like that that has made King so popular, and helped the popular from the shackles of simple genre writing. He is a master of masters."[128] In 2003, King was honored by the National Book Awards with a time achievement award, the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Some in the literary community expressed disapproval of the award: Richard E. Snyder, the former CEO of Simon & Schuster, described King's work as "non-literature" and critic Harold Bloom denounced the choice: The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for "distinguished contribution" to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural . I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar an Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.[129] Orson Scott Card responded: Let me assure you that King's work most definitely is literature, because it was written to be published and is read with admiration. What Snyder rey means is that it is not the literature preferred by the academic-literary elite.[130] In 2008, King's book On Writing was ranked 21st on Entertainment Weekly's list of "The Classics: The 100 Best Reads from 1983 to 2008".[131] [Invest Knowledge Media]( InvestKnowledgeMedia.com brought to you by Inception Media, LLC. This editorial email with educational news was sent to {EMAIL}. [Unsubscribe]( to stop receiving marketing communication from us. Jules Gabriel Verne (/vɜːrn/;[1][2] French: [ʒyl ɡabʁijɛl vɛʁn]; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905)[3] was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires,[3] a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time. In addition to his novels, he wrote numerous plays, short stories, autobiographical accounts, poetry, songs, and scientific, artistic, and literary studies. His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music and video games. Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism.[4] His reputation was markedly different in the Anglosphere where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed. Since the 1980s, his literary reputation has improved.[5] Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare.[6] He has sometimes been called the "father of science fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback.[7] In the 2010s, he was the most translated French author in the world. In France, 2005 was declared "Jules Verne Year" on the occasion of the centenary of the writer's death. Life Early life Painting of Nantes from Île Feydeau, around the time of Verne's birth Verne was born on 8 February 1828, on Île Feydeau, a then small artificial island on the river Loire within the town of Nantes (later filled-in and incorporated into the surrounding land-area), in No. 4 Rue Olivier-de-Clisson, the house of his maternal grandmother Dame Sophie Marie Adélaïde Julienne Allotte de La Fuÿe (born Guillochet de La Perrière).[8] His parents were Pierre Verne, an attorney originally from Provins, and Sophie Allotte de La Fuÿe, a Nantes woman from a local family of navigators and shipowners, of distant Scottish descent.[9][b] In 1829, the Verne family moved some hundred metres away to No. 2 Quai Jean-Bart, where Verne's brother Paul was born the same year. Three sisters, Anne "Anna" (1836), Mathilde (1839), and Marie (1842) would follow.[9] In 1834, at the age of six, Verne was sent to boarding school at 5 Place du Bouffay in Nantes. The teacher, Madame Sambin, was the widow of a naval captain who had disappeared some 30 years before.[10] Madame Sambin often told the students that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway and that he would eventually return like Robinson Crusoe from his desert island paradise.[11] The theme of the robinsonade would stay with Verne throughout his life and appear in many of his novels, some of which include The Mysterious Island (1874), Second Fatherland (1900), and The School for Robinsons (1882). In 1836, Verne went on to École Saint‑Stanislas, a Catholic school suiting the pious religious tastes of his father. Verne quickly distinguished himself in mémoire (recitation from memory), geography, Greek, Latin, and singing.[12] In the same year, 1836, Pierre Verne bought a vacation house at 29 Rue des Réformés in the village of Chantenay (now part of Nantes) on the Loire.[13] In his brief memoir Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse (Memories of Childhood and Youth, 1890), Verne recalled a deep fascination with the river and with the many merchant vessels navigating it.[14] He also took vacations at Brains, in the house of his uncle Prudent Allotte, a retired shipowner, who had gone around the world and served as mayor of Brains from 1828 to 1837. Verne took joy in playing interminable rounds of the Game of the Goose with his uncle, and both the game and his uncle's name would be memorialized in two late novels (The Will of an Eccentric (1900) and Robur the Conqueror (1886), respectively).[14][15] Legend has it that in 1839, at the age of 11, Verne secretly procured a spot as cabin boy on the three-mast ship Coralie with the intention of traveling to the Indies and bringing back a coral necklace for his cousin Caroline. The evening the ship set out for the Indies, it stopped first at Paimboeuf where Pierre Verne arrived just in time to catch his son and make him promise to travel "only in his imagination".[16] It is now known that the legend is an exaggerated tale invented by Verne's first biographer, his niece Marguerite Allotte de la Füye, though it may have been inspired by a real incident.[17] The Lycée Royal in Nantes (now the Georges-Clemenceau), where Verne studied In 1840, the Vernes moved again to a large apartment at No. 6 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, where the family's youngest child, Marie, was born in 1842.[13] In the same year Verne entered another religious school, the Petit Séminaire de Saint-Donatien, as a lay student. His unfinished novel Un prêtre en 1839 (A Priest in 1839), written in his teens and the earliest of his prose works to survive,[18] describes the seminary in disparaging terms.[12] From 1844 to 1846, Verne and his brother were enrolled in the Lycée Royal (now the Lycée Georges-Clemenceau) in Nantes. After finishing classes in rhetoric and philosophy, he took the baccalauréat at Rennes and received the grade "Good Enough" on 29 July 1846.[19] By 1847, when Verne was 19, he had taken seriously to writing long works in the style of Victor Hugo, beginning Un prêtre en 1839 and seeing two verse tragedies, Alexandre VI and La Conspiration des poudres (The Gunpowder Plot), to completion.[18] However, his father took it for granted that Verne, being the firstborn son of the family, would not attempt to make money in literature but would instead inherit the family law practice.[20] In 1847, Verne's father sent him to Paris, primarily to begin his studies in law school, and secondarily (according to family legend) to distance him temporarily from Nantes.[21][22] His cousin Caroline, with whom he was in love, was married on 27 April 1847, to Émile Dezaunay, a man of 40, with whom she would have five children.[23] After a short stay in Paris, where he passed first-year law exams, Verne returned to Nantes for his father's help in preparing for the second year. (Provincial law students were in that era required to go to Paris to take exams.)[24] While in Nantes, he met Rose Herminie Arnaud Grossetière, a young woman one year his senior, and fell intensely in love with her. He wrote and dedicated some thirty poems to her, including La Fille de l'air (The Daughter of Air), which describes her as "blonde and enchanting / winged and transparent".[25] His passion seems to have been reciprocated, at least for a short time,[22] but Grossetière's parents frowned upon the idea of their daughter marrying a young student of uncertain future. They married her instead to Armand Terrien de la Haye, a rich landowner ten years her senior, on 19 July 1848.[26] The sudden marriage sent Verne into deep frustration. He wrote a hallucinatory letter to his mother, apparently composed in a state of half-drunkenness, in which under pretext of a dream he described his misery.[27] This requited but aborted love affair seems to have permanently marked the author and his work, and his novels include a significant number of young women married against their will (Gérande in Master Zacharius (1854), Sava in Mathias Sandorf (1885), Ellen in A Floating City (1871), etc.), to such an extent that the scholar Christian Chelebourg attributed the recurring theme to a "Herminie complex".[28] The incident also led Verne to bear a grudge against his birthplace and Nantes society, which he criticized in his poem La sixième ville de France (The Sixth City of France).[29][30] Studies in Paris In July 1848, Verne left Nantes again for Paris, where his father intended him to finish law studies and take up law as a profession. He obtained permission from his father to rent a furnished apartment at 24 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, which he shared with Édouard Bonamy, another student of Nantes origin.[27] (On his 1847 Paris visit, Verne had stayed at 2 Rue Thérèse, the house of his aunt Charuel, on the Butte Saint-Roch.)[31] Verne arrived in Paris during a time of political upheaval: the French Revolution of 1848. In February, Louis Philippe I had been overthrown and had fled; on 24 February, a provisional government of the French Second Republic took power, but political demonstrations continued, and social tension remained. In June, barricades went up in Paris, and the government sent Louis-Eugène Cavaignac to crush the insurrection. Verne entered the city shortly before the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as the first president of the Republic, a state of affairs that would last until the French coup of 1851. In a letter to his family, Verne described the bombarded state of the city after the recent June Days uprising but assured them that the anniversary of Bastille Day had gone by without any significant conflict.[32] Aristide Hignard Verne used his family connections to make an entrance into Paris society. His uncle Francisque de Chatêaubourg introduced him into literary salons, and Verne particularly frequented those of Mme de Barrère, a friend of his mother's.[33] While continuing his law studies, he fed his passion for the theater, writing numerous plays. Verne later recalled: "I was greatly under the influence of Victor Hugo, indeed, very excited by reading and re-reading his works. At that time I could have recited by heart whole pages of Notre Dame de Paris, but it was his dramatic work that most influenced me."[34] Another source of creative stimulation came from a neighbor: living on the same floor in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie apartment house was a young composer, Aristide Hignard, with whom Verne soon became good friends, and Verne wrote several texts for Hignard to set as chansons.[35] During this period, Verne's letters to his parents primarily focused on expenses and on a suddenly appearing series of violent stomach cramps,[36] the first of many he would suffer from during his life. (Modern scholars have hypothesized that he suffered from colitis;[36] Verne believed the illness to have been inherited from his mother's side.[37]) Rumors of an outbreak of cholera in March 1849 exacerbated these medical concerns.[36] Yet another health problem would strike in 1851 when Verne suffered the first of four attacks of facial paralysis. These attacks, rather than being psychosomatic, were due to an inflammation in the middle ear, though this cause remained unknown to Verne during his life.[38] In the same year, Verne was required to enlist in the French army, but the sortition process spared him, to his great relief. He wrote to his father: "You should already know, dear papa, what I think of the military life, and of these domestic servants in livery. … You have to abandon all dignity to perform such functions."[39] Verne's strong antiwar sentiments, to the dismay of his father, would remain steadfast throughout his life.[39] Though writing profusely and frequenting the salons, Verne diligently pursued his law studies and graduated with a licence en droit in January 1851.[40] Literary debut Thanks to his visits to salons, Verne came into contact in 1849 with Alexandre Dumas through the mutual acquaintance of a celebrated chirologist of the time, the Chevalier d'Arpentigny.[40] Verne became close friends with Dumas' son, Alexandre Dumas fils, and showed him a manuscript for a stage comedy, Les Pailles rompues (The Broken Straws). The two young men revised the play together, and Dumas, through arrangements with his father, had it produced by the Opéra-National at the Théâtre Historique in Paris, opening on 12 June 1850.[41] Cover of an 1854–55 issue of Musée des familles In 1851, Verne met with a fellow writer from Nantes, Pierre-Michel-François Chevalier (known as "Pitre-Chevalier"), the editor-in-chief of the magazine Musée des familles (The Family Museum).[42] Pitre-Chevalier was looking for articles about geography, history, science, and technology, and was keen to make sure that the educational component would be made accessible to large popular audiences using a straightforward prose style or an engaging fictional story. Verne, with his delight in diligent research, especially in geography, was a natural for the job.[43] Verne first offered him a short historical adventure story, The First Ships of the Mexican Navy, written in the style of James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels had deeply influenced him.[42] Pitre-Chevalier published it in July 1851, and in the same year published a second short story by Verne, A Voyage in a Balloon (August 1851). The latter story, with its combination of adventurous narrative, travel themes, and detailed historical research, would later be described by Verne as "the first indication of the line of novel that I was destined to follow".[34] Dumas fils put Verne in contact with Jules Seveste, a stage director who had taken over the directorship of the Théâtre Historique and renamed it the Théâtre Lyrique. Seveste offered Verne the job of secretary of the theater, with little or no salary attached.[9] Verne accepted, using the opportunity to write and produce several comic operas written in collaboration with Hignard and the prolific librettist Michel Carré.[44] To celebrate his employment at the Théâtre Lyrique, Verne joined with ten friends to found a bachelors' dining club, the Onze-sans-femme (Eleven Bachelors).[45] For some time, Verne's father pressed him to abandon his writing and begin a business as a lawyer. However, Verne argued in his letters that he could only find success in literature.[46] The pressure to plan for a secure future in law reached its climax in January 1852, when his father offered Verne his own Nantes law practice.[47] Faced with this ultimatum, Verne decided conclusively to continue his literary life and refuse the job, writing: "Am I not right to follow my own instincts? It's because I know who I am that I realize what I can be one day."[48] Jacques Arago Meanwhile, Verne was spending much time at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, conducting research for his stories and feeding his passion for science and recent discoveries, especially in geography. It was in this period that Verne met the illustrious geographer and explorer Jacques Arago, who continued to travel extensively despite his blindness (he had lost his sight completely in 1837). The two men became good friends, and Arago's innovative and witty accounts of his travels led Verne toward a newly developing genre of literature: that of travel writing.[49][50] In 1852, two new pieces from Verne appeared in the Musée des familles: Martin Paz, a novella set in Lima, which Verne wrote in 1851 and published 10 July through 11 August 1852, and Les Châteaux en Californie, ou, Pierre qui roule n'amasse pas mousse (The Castles in California, or, A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss), a one-act comedy full of racy double entendres.[51] In April and May 1854, the magazine published Verne's short story Master Zacharius, an E. T. A. Hoffmann-like fantasy featuring a sharp condemnation of scientific hubris and ambition,[52] followed soon afterward by A Winter Amid the Ice, a polar adventure story whose themes closely anticipated many of Verne's novels.[53] The Musée also published some nonfiction popular science articles which, though unsigned, are generally attributed to Verne.[43] Verne's work for the magazine was cut short in 1856 when he had a serious quarrel with Pitre-Chevalier and refused to continue contributing (a refusal he would maintain until 1863, when Pitre-Chevalier died, and the magazine went to new editorship).[54] While writing stories and articles for Pitre-Chevalier, Verne began to form the idea of inventing a new kind of novel, a "Roman de la Science" ("novel of science"), which would allow him to incorporate large amounts of the factual information he so enjoyed researching in the Bibliothèque. He is said to have discussed the project with the elder Alexandre Dumas, who had tried something similar with an unfinished novel, Isaac Laquedem, and who enthusiastically encouraged Verne's project.[55] At the end of 1854, another outbreak of cholera led to the death of Jules Seveste, Verne's employer at the Théâtre Lyrique and by then a good friend.[53] Though his contract only held him to a further year of service, Verne remained connected to the theater for several years after Seveste's death, seeing additional productions to fruition.[56] He also continued to write plays and musical comedies, most of which were not performed.[54] Family In May 1856, Verne traveled to Amiens to be the best man at the wedding of a Nantes friend, Auguste Lelarge, to an Amiens woman named Aimée du Fraysne de Viane. Verne, invited to stay with the bride's family, took to them warmly, befriending the entire household and finding himself increasingly attracted to the bride's sister, Honorine Anne Hébée Morel (née du Fraysne de Viane), a widow aged 26 with two young children.[57][58] Hoping to find a secure source of income, as well as a chance to court Morel in earnest, he jumped at her brother's offer to go into business with a broker.[59] Verne's father was initially dubious but gave in to his son's requests for approval in November 1856. With his financial situation finally looking promising, Verne won the favor of Morel and her family, and the couple were married on 10 January 1857.[60] Jules Verne Museum, Butte Saint-Anne, Nantes, France Verne plunged into his new business obligations, leaving his work at the Théâtre Lyrique and taking up a full-time job as an agent de change[54] on the Paris Bourse, where he became the associate of the broker Fernand Eggly.[61] Verne woke up early each morning so that he would have time to write, before going to the Bourse for the day's work; in the rest of his spare time, he continued to consort with the Onze-Sans-Femme club (all eleven of its "bachelors" had by this time married). He also continued to frequent the Bibliothèque to do scientific and historical research, much of which he copied onto notecards for future use—a system he would continue for the rest of his life.[54] According to the recollections of a colleague, Verne "did better in repartee than in business".[61] In July 1858, Verne and Aristide Hignard seized an opportunity offered by Hignard's brother: a sea voyage, at no charge, from Bordeaux to Liverpool and Scotland. The journey, Verne's first trip outside France, deeply impressed him, and upon his return to Paris he fictionalized his recollections to form the backbone of a semi-autobiographical novel, Backwards to Britain (written in the autumn and winter of 1859–1860 and not published until 1989).[62] A second complimentary voyage in 1861 took Hignard and Verne to Stockholm, from where they traveled to Christiania and through Telemark.[63] Verne left Hignard in Denmark to return in haste to Paris, but missed the birth on 3 August 1861 of his only biological son, Michel.[64] Meanwhile, Verne continued work on the idea of a "Roman de la Science", which he developed in a rough draft, inspired, according to his recollections, by his "love for maps and the great explorers of the world". It took shape as a story of travel across Africa and would eventually become his first published novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon.[54] Feel free to contact us toll free Domestic/International: +17072979173 Mon–Fri, 9am–5pm ET, or email us support@investknowledgemedia.com 600 N Broad St Ste 5 PMB 1, Middletown, DE 19709 Inception Media, LLC. All rights reserved[.](