Draws on unpublished correspondence between the renowned science fiction author and various friends and family members, and recreates Verne's life from his youth in Nantes to his self-imposed exile outside of Paris as an adult.

Herbert Lottman was an American journalist and author who spend most of his life in France.
He majored in English and biology at the University of New York, graduating in 1948 and earned a master’s in English from Columbia in 1951.
In 1956 he moved to Paris and became the manager of the Paris branch of the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He also was writing for Publishers Weekly for four decades and wrote a novel, Detours From the Grand Tour.
But he is most reknowned for his biographies on French personalities and his writings on French intellectual life.