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Around the World in Eighty Days (French: Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours) is an adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, published in 1873. In the story, Phileas Fogg of London and his newly employed French valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a GBP20,000 wager (GBP2,242,900 in 2019) set by his friends at the Reform Club. It is one of Verne's most acclaimed works. The story starts in London on Wednesday, 2 October 1872. Phileas Fogg is a rich British gentleman living in solitude. Despite his wealth, Fogg lives a modest life with habits carried out with mathematical precision. Very little can be said about his social life other than that he is a member of the Reform Club, where he spends much of every day. Having dismissed his former valet, James Forster, for bringing him shaving water at 84 DegreesF (29 DegreesC) instead of 86 DegreesF (30 DegreesC), Fogg hires Frenchman Jean Passepartout as a replacement. At the Reform Club, Fogg gets involved in an argument over an article in The Daily Telegraph stating that with the opening of a new railway section in India, it is now possible to travel around the world in 80 days. He accepts a wager for GBP20,000 (GBP2,221,600 in 2018), [4] half of his total fortune, from his fellow club members to complete such a journey within this time period. With Passepartout accompanying him, Fogg departs from London by train at 8:45 p.m. on 2 October; in order to win the wager, he must return to the club by this same time on 21 December, 80 days later. They take the remaining GBP20,000 of Fogg's fortune with them to cover expenses during the journey.

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Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 - 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism.[3] His reputation was markedly different in Anglophone regions where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed. Since the 1980s, his literary reputation has improved.[4] Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare.[5] He has sometimes been called the Father of Science Fiction, a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback Verne was born on 8 February 1828, on Ile Feydeau, a small artificial island on the Loire River within the town of Nantes, in No. 4 Rue Olivier-de-Clisson, the house of his maternal grandmother Dame Sophie Allotte de la Fuye.[7] His parents were Pierre Verne, an attorney originally from Provins, and Sophie Allote de la Fuye, a Nantes woman from a local family of navigators and shipowners, of distant Scottish descent.[8][a] In 1829, the Verne family moved some hundred meters away to No. 2 Quai Jean-Bart, where Verne's brother Paul was born the same year. Three sisters, Anna (1836), Mathilde (1839), and Marie (1842) would follow.[8] In 1834, at the age of six, Verne was sent to boarding school at 5 Place du Bouffay in Nantes. The teacher, Mme Sambin, was the widow of a naval captain who had disappeared some 30 years before.[9] Mme Sambin often told the students that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway and that he would eventually return like Robinson Crusoe from his desert island paradise.[10] The theme of the Robinsonade would stay with Verne throughout his life and appear in many of his novels, including The Mysterious Island (1874), Second Fatherland (1900), and The School for Robinsons (1882).

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