Edgar Allan Poe inspired Jules Verne. A person may be born a writer, but there is always a reason they are inspired to get started in the first place. As for Jules Verne, research has shown that he was inspired by Edgar, so what we are left with is how this is so. Did Edgar truly inspire Jules Verne?
If we are to talk of writers that inspired Jules Verne, one may go on and on naming them, but when one is being specific with the American region, all doubts should be removed, it is Allan Poe. Enough of this proposal, let’s jump into facts.
It has been confirmed that while Jules Verne was inspired by a number of writers, the American author that inspired him most was Edgar Allan Poe, the famous gothic writer.
In a 2018 publication, Mental Floss wrote that despite the ruin Edgar Allan’s hoax brought to him in 1844, the work managed to inspire at least one person: Jules Verne.
This misinformation that was published by Edgar on the Sun on purpose, was later tagged The Balloon Hoax. With this information, Allan hoped to prank an entire city: New York, and it was a success. He did that to draw companies’ attention to him as a journalist but ironically it is the reason writing companies won’t accept it. While all of these negative effects were there for Jules to learn from this event, he chose to focus on Edgar’s dexterity in writing sci-fi that could confuse a city!!
This account triggered Jules and caused him to write his 1863 first most successful piece, “Five Weeks in a Balloon”. The work rose to instant success upon publication.
Key Takeaways:
- Edgar Allan Poe was the American writer that inspired Jules Verne.
- Jules, like Edgar, had a nose for what makes an outstanding science fiction.
- Edgar Allan Poe lived from 1809-1849.
- Jules lived from 1828-1905.
In the same vein, Jule Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon helped the author gain the financial independence to continue with his career as a writer, releasing blockbuster stories thereafter.
Consequent to this unprecedented success, Jule became a lifelong fan of Edgar’s works as Kirkus Reviews would later put it in 2012. But, actually, you couldn’t expect less from Jules.
I was right, there was no less demonstration of attraction to Edgar from Jules. He wrote An Antarctic Mystery, a work he called the completion of Edgar Allan’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” in 1897, a few years after he noted that the original work was incomplete.
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Are these not enough reasons to know that Edgar Allan Poe was the American author who inspired Jules Verne?
Similarities Between Their Works
Jules Verne and Allan Poe both had an exceptional aura for science fiction and an indomitable zeal to chase this desire.
Taking a mix of the fantastic and the real world, they took time to master scientific theories that could make fiction look real.
Both authors together strived, each in his own time, to give us an interesting view of the future of science. For one, Allan’s 1844 hoax of the balloonists crossing the Atlantic was attained later in 1978.
Who is Jules Verne?
There is a lot to say about Jules Verne, but understanding that this article is not primarily dedicated to his biography and therefore will not cover all that could be said about him will make a lot of sense as we continue to explore.
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French poet, playwright, and novelist born in Nantes, Brittany, France on February 8, 1828. Pierre Verne, his father was an attorney and his mother was Sophie Allotte de La Fuye.
Because of his success as a law practitioner, Pierre Verne wanted Jules Verne to become a lawyer too, but despite sending him to study law in Paris, Jule’s passion for writing got a better part of him.
So, it turned out that while he was studying law in Paris, his uncle introduced him to literary salons, where he started picking interest in writing plays. At the time, most of his poems and plays were majorly inspired by Victor Hugo.
Jules Verne studied law but he was more interested in writing than in practising law, so he followed his passion and became notable for it.
His works, many of which fall under the Romanticism/Neo-Romanticism literary movement, were highly influential. Some of them have been adopted for television, theater, and film, among others by filmmakers.
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Jules influenced the literary world so greatly that he earned himself the position of the second most-translated author of all time, coming right above William Shakespeare.
About a month after his 76th birthday— Jules died of diabetes on March 24, 1905. Hundred years later, in 2005, France set the year aside for the remembrance of the author’s hundredth year of departure.
Works By Jules Verne
Jules Verne wrote several pieces of essays and works of other genres, but below are some of his notable works:
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
- An Antarctic Mystery
- Around the World in Eighty Days
- In Search of the Castaways
- Journey to the Center of the Earth
- The Mysterious Island
- From the Earth to the Moon
Who is Edgar Allan Poe?
On the other hand, Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. His parents, David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold, were both actors.
Tragically, his father abandoned the family, and his mother died of tuberculosis when he was just three years old.
As a result, Poe was orphaned and taken in by John and Frances Allan, a wealthy couple from Richmond, Virginia. Even though the family never formally adopted him, he took their name and was known as Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe attended the University of Virginia but left due to financial difficulties. He then enlisted in the U.S. Army under the name Edgar A. Perry. After a few years, he left the military and began publishing his early poems.
In 1835, Poe married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, who was just 13 years old at the time. They moved to various cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, where Poe worked as an editor, critic, and writer.
Poe’s writing career gained momentum in the 1830s and 1840s with the publication of several well-received poems, short stories, and literary criticism.
But despite his literary success, Poe struggled with financial instability and personal demons, including alcoholism. His wife, Virginia, succumbed to tuberculosis in 1847, which further exacerbated his struggles.
Edgar Allan Poe’s life was marked by tragedy. On October 7, 1849, at the age of 40, he was found delirious and incoherent on the streets of Baltimore. He died four days later in a hospital, and the cause of his death is still a subject of speculation.
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