Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea of the premiere adventure novels and one of Verne's greatest works, along with "Around the World in Eighty Days" and "Journey to the Center of the Earth". The description of Nemo's ship, the "Nautilus", was considered ahead of its time, as it accurately describes features on submarines, which at the time were very primitive vessels. A model of the French submarine "Plongeur" (launched in 1863) was displayed at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, where it was studied by Jules Verne, who used it as an inspiration for the novel. The title refers to the "distance traveled" while under the sea and
Cultural influence of Jules Verne counted Verne as a main influence on his own fiction as well as on literature and science the world over, saying "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne." Other literary figures known to have been influenced by Verne include Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Blaise Cendrars, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Aymé, René Barjavel, Claude Roy, Michel Butor, and Roland Barthes. Verne is also often cited as a major influence of the science fiction genre steampunk, though Verne's works themselves are not of the genre. Cultural influence of Jules Verne Jules Verne (1828–1905), the French writer best