Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Now available in a new translation, this classic of nineteenth century French literature has been consistently praised for its style and its vision of the world. Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel travel across Iceland, and then down through an extinct crater toward a sunless sea wherethey enter a living past and are confronted with the origins of man. Exploring the prehistory of the globe, this novel can also be read as a psychological quest, for the journey itself is as important as arrival or discovery. Verne's distinctive combination of realism and Romanticism has markedfigures as diverse as Sartre and Tournier, Mark Twain and Conan Doyle.

Jules Verne, born at Nantes, France, in 1828, of legal and seafaring stock, was the author of innumerable adventure stories that combined a vivid imagination with a gift for popularizing science. Although he studied law at Paris, he devoted his life entirely to writing. His most popular stories, besides 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870), include: Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), A Trip to the Moon (1865), Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), and Michael Strogoff (1876). In addition, he was the author of a number of successful plays, as well as a popular history of exploration from Phoenician times to the mid-nineteenth century, The Discovery of the Earth (1878-80). After a long and active career in literature, Jules Verne died at Amiens, France, in 1905.

Robert Baldick translated many volumes from the French for Penguin Classics, including volumes by Diderot, Flaubert, and Verne, and wrote a biography of Huysmans. He died in 1972.