Dumas Born: Adventure's Greatest Storyteller Arrives

Alexandre Dumas became the most widely read French author of his century by turning history into breathless adventure in The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Born in Villers-Cotterets in 1802, he was the grandson of a Haitian slave named Marie-Cessette Dumas and the Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman who had sold his own children into slavery before eventually reclaiming his son Thomas-Alexandre. That son, Dumas's father, became a general in Napoleon's army and the highest-ranking person of African descent in European military history to that point. The general died when Alexandre was four, leaving the family impoverished. Dumas moved to Paris with nothing but beautiful handwriting and connections to his father's former military colleagues. He wrote plays first, scoring a massive hit with Henri III and His Court in 1829, then turned to novels published in serial installments in Parisian newspapers. His serialized novels, often produced with uncredited collaborators like Auguste Maquet at industrial speed, appeared in daily installments that kept all of France reading. He wrote over a hundred novels and earned enormous sums, but spent even more extravagantly, building a chateau he called Monte Cristo and hosting parties that attracted half of literary Paris. He died nearly penniless in 1870. Throughout his career, he achieved literary fame in a society that openly questioned his racial background, enduring caricatures and insults that he answered with productivity rather than polemic.