Born in 1828, Jules Verne dutifully followed the career track of an ordinary bourgeois Frenchman. However literary ambition soon took over and at the age of twenty he began publishing plays and short stories. In 1862 he teamed up with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel and the two men entered into one of the most fruitful relationships in literary history. Verne remains best known for Journey to the Center of the Earth,From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The Mysterious Island. By the end of his life in 1905, Verne had published more than sixty books.