Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas is one of the world’s most beloved French authors and playwrights. He is most well known for his works The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Christo, both of which were originally published in serialised form. 

His other famous works include Twenty Years Later and The Man in the Iron Mask, and he also wrote countless plays, travel books, and magazine articles. 

Meet Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was born in 1802 as Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie in Picardy, France. 

His father, a French General, died when Alexandre was just four years old. As a young man, Alexandre moved to Paris in the hopes of working as a lawyer, yet ended up working in the household of the Duke d’Orleans (who would later become the Citizen King Louis-Philippe), before dabbling with playwrighting and getting into social circles with other young actors and poets of the time. 

After finding some success with his plays, he turned his attention to novels. His style was romantic, and his stories were exciting and action-packed more than anything else. His entrepreneurial spirit led him to found a production studio, which hired writers who authored countless stories under his direction. 

Alexandre Dumas was known for his lavish lifestyle, which he largely maintained by his high earnings, but which also regularly saw him in financial troubles. He would eventually spend time living in Belgium, Russia, and Italy, and write travel books about all of them. 

One of his regular social gatherings was with a number of other famous young writers, including Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire. They would get together once a month in Paris to take hasish, and therefore named themselves the ‘Club des Hashischins’. 

Dumas’ works have been translated into numerous languages and continue to endure in popularity around the world. They have been adapted for the stage, television, and film, and there is a Paris Metro station named in his honour. The Dumas Society was founded in 1971 in order to preserve the Chateau de Monte-Christo and to bring together fans of the prolific author, and the Chateau itself has been restored and is open to the public as a museum. 

Due to his extensive writing, Dumas’ final novel was only published in 2005. Titled ‘The Knight of Sainte-Hermine’ (or The Last Cavalier in English), it was the work Dumas was writing before he died, and was finished with the help of his author notes and a Dumas scholar.