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.

From the discovery of a strange parchment in an old bookseller's shop to the fantastic descent through a dormant volcano into a subterranean world of danger and beauty, A Journey to the Center of the Earth is as wonderfully entertaining today as when it was first published.

One of Jules Verne's finest novels, its unique combination of "hard" science and vivid imagination helped establish this brilliant Frenchman as the father of modern science fiction. A high-tension odyssey, it depicts three men who venture into an unknown, fearsome underworld to discover what lies at the mysterious center of the earth-while risking their chances of ever returning to the surface alive.

With an Introduction by Bear Grylls
and an Afterword by Leonard Nimoy