BIBLIOGRAPHY
An offer of free audiobooks of Jules Verne (February 8, 1828 – March 24, 1905) classics was a chance to revisit the wild and wondrous worlds described by Verne in his Voyages Extraordinaires series which includes the big three — Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). Twenty Thousand Leagues… further occasioned reading The Mysterious Island (1975) where the captivating backstory of the fascinating Captain Nemo is revealed.
Verne had left Nemo’s identity purposely vague after clashing with his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Verne had initially conceived of Nemo as a Polish scientist who goes on a roaring rampage of revenge against the Russians who killed his family during the January Uprising. Hetzel did not want to lose out on sales of the Russian translations (ever the commercial publisher) and tried to get Verne to change Nemo’s enemies to slave traders and thus make him a regular hero.
