Jules Verne 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. His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has 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 are often reprinted. Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "Father of Science Fiction", a
Agatha Christie their mother insisted that Agatha receive a home education. As a result, her parents were responsible for teaching her to read and write and to master basic arithmetic, a subject she particularly enjoyed. They also taught her music, and she learned to play both the piano and the mandolin. According to biographer Laura Thomson, Clara believed that Agatha should not learn to read until she was eight. However, thanks to her own curiosity, Agatha taught herself to read much earlier. One of the earliest known photographs of Christie depicts her as a little girl with her first dog, whom she