The Square Pegs by Irving Wallace

Verne read on, devouring every detail of the American traveler’s difficulties and adventures. The American, a Bostonian named George Francis Train, had sped from New York to San Francisco through red-Indian country in seven days aboard the new Union Pacific train. He had left California on August 1, 1870, and arrived in Japan a mere twenty-five days later. In Tokyo he had astonished the Mikado’s subjects by joining them, in the nude, in a public bath. After putting Hong Kong, Saigon, and Singapore behind him, Train passed through the recently opened Suez Canal in the Mediterranean, and thence to Marseilles. In Marseilles he became a leader of the Commune, was jailed for two weeks in Lyons, met Gambetta in Tours, then hired a private wagons-lits coach and raced across France to the Channel. From Liverpool he caught a ship for America, and returned to his destination after eighty days of almost perpetual motion.
    Jules Verne was fascinated. In 1871 the idea of circling the world at great speed was almost as dramatic as the science fiction he had created earlier about an underwater boat that could travel fifty miles an hour on an exploration beneath the oceans and beneath the Isthmus of Suez (by use of a tunnel). Inspired by George Francis Train’s adventures, as well as by the postwar advertisements of Cook’s Tours in shopwindows, Verne began to draft his hero, Phileas Fogg, and his story, Around the World in Eighty Days .
    He finished writing the novel in November 1872. But before permitting his friend Pierre Jule Hetzel to publish it as one of the “ Voyages Extraordinaires ” he agreed to its serialization in the popular press. It appeared in Le Temps, a chapter a day in feuilleton that is, in the literary supplement during the early part of 1873.
    It was not literature, but it was high adventure of the most thrilling sort, and it delighted Verne fans then, even as it continues to delight them to this day. By the alchemy of fiction Verne transformed the emotional and erratic American, George Francis Train, into the emotionless and precise Englishman, Phileas Fogg, Esq., enigmatic and respected member of the London Reform Club. Using Train’s actual escapades as the basis of his story, Verne had Phileas Fogg wager 40,000 pounds that he could circle the globe in eighty days, and then forced Fogg to traverse a portion of India on an elephant, rescue a Parsi girl named Aouda from a flaming pyre, outwit a detective in China who thought him a thief, reach Omaha on a sledge bearing sails, cross the Atlantic by burning the superstructure of his steamer for fuel, and finally arrive in London one day late only to learn, at the last moment, that he had gained a day by traveling eastward around the world.
    The sensation created by the publication of this story was enormous. No Gallic armchair adventurer was without his Temps . English and American foreign correspondents cabled entire chapters daily to their papers in England and the United States, treating Phileas Fogg’s progress as straight news. The citizenry of three nations breathlessly, and simultaneously, followed each installment, and many wagered on the success or failure of Phileas Fogg’s race against time.
    “Seldom has any piece of fiction excited such a furor,” wrote Charles F. Home, who edited an American edition of Verne’s collected works. “Liberal offers were made to the author by various transportation companies, if he would advertise their routes by having his hero travel by them. And when the final passage of the Atlantic from America to England was to be accomplished, the bids for notice by the various transatlantic lines are said to have reached fabulous sums.”
    Verne did not have to compromise or commercialize his story to obtain “fabulous sums.” With the publication of Around the World in Eighty Days as a novel, and its adaptation into a play which ran in Paris for three years, and after that in Vienna, Brussels, London, and New York,