Alexandre Dumas

Life

Alexandre Dumas was born in 1802 at Villers-Cotterêts, northeast of Paris. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was the son of a French nobleman and an enslaved African woman from Saint-Domingue, and had risen to the rank of general in the Revolutionary armies before falling out with Napoleon. He died when Alexandre was three, leaving the family poor. Dumas had little formal schooling, worked as a clerk, and moved to Paris in his early twenties, where a post in the household of the Duke of Orléans gave him time to write.

He made his name first as a playwright. His drama Henri III and His Court, staged in 1829, was one of the first successes of French Romantic theater, ahead of Victor Hugo’s Hernani. In the 1840s he turned to serialized fiction and, working with collaborators, above all Auguste Maquet, produced the novels that made him one of the most read writers in the world: The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Twenty Years After and the long sequence about the Valois and Bourbon courts.

Dumas earned enormous sums and spent more. He built a château, founded and lost a theater, went bankrupt, and left France for Brussels in 1851 partly to escape creditors. He traveled widely, took part in Garibaldi’s campaign in Italy, and kept writing to the end. He died in 1870 near Dieppe. In 2002 his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris.

Literary significance

Dumas is the great entertainer of French literature. His novels are long, fast and built on dialogue, with historical settings used as a stage for adventure rather than as a subject for analysis. He had a gift for scenes and for characters who can be summed up in a line, and his plots, however improbable, hold together over hundreds of pages. Critics in his lifetime treated him as a manufacturer of fiction, and the question of how much his collaborators wrote has never gone away, but the books themselves have outlasted most of the serious literature of their decade.

His output was vast, running to hundreds of volumes including travel writing, memoirs and a large cookbook. The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo remain the works by which he is known.

Where to start

The Count of Monte Cristo is the fuller and darker book and is in this library. The Three Musketeers, also here, is shorter and lighter and is the better first choice for readers who want to see whether Dumas is for them.