Verne (1828-1905) was a French novelist, playwright and poet. He quit his early profession as a lawyer to write for magazines and the stage, and his collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Whilst he is considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, his reputation is markedly different in English-speaking countries where he is more often perceived as a writer of genre fiction or children'sbooks, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations of his works. The Fur Country is a translation of Le Pays de fourrures (1873), part of the Voyages extraordinaires series, first published in England by Sampson and Low and in the United States by James Osgood (1874). The translation is by N. d'Anvers, a pseudonym for Nancy (Mrs. Arthur) Bell (d. 1933), who also translated other works of Jules Verne.