This image is the cover for the book A Floating City and the Blockade Runners, Classics To Go

A Floating City and the Blockade Runners, Classics To Go

The Blockade Runners (French: Les forceurs de blocus) is an 1865 novella by Jules Verne. In 1871 it was published in single volume together with novel A Floating City as a part of the Voyages Extraordinaires series (The Extraordinary Voyages). An English translation was published in 1874. The American Civil War plot centers on the exploits of a British merchant captain named James Playfair who must break the Union blockade of Charleston harbor in South Carolina to trade supplies for cotton and, later in the book, to rescue Halliburtt, the abolitionist journalist father of a young girl held prisoner (the father, not the girl) by the Confederates. Verne's tale was inspired by reality as many ships were actually lost while acting as blockade runners in and around Charleston in the early 1860s.

Jules Verne

Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time.

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