Jules Gabriel Verne was born in February 1828. He developed a passion for travelling and adventure at an early age. Verne had begun writing in his teens. Un prêtre en 1839 (A Priest in 1839), his unfinished novel, is one of his earliest surviving prose works. His first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, was published by Hetzel in 1863. The Adventures of Captain Hatteras was first published in book form in 1866. The Voyages Extraordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages or Extraordinary Journeys), a sequence of fifty-four novels, was published between 1863 and 1905. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From Earth to the Moon (1865), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870), were some of the works included in the series. Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) is one of Verne’s most acclaimed works. Verne died in 1905 at his home in Amiens. Paris in the Twentieth Century (1994), written in 1863, and Backwards to Britain (1989), were two of his works published posthumously.