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Introduction

Alexandre Dumas

How did Alexandre Dumas (1802- 1870) become one of France’s greatest authors and one of the world’s most appreciated novelists? Dumas’s father died when he was a small boy, so he grew up listening to his mother’s stories of his father’s bravery in war. These stories spurred him to write such swashbuckling classics as The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Man in the Iron Mask. In addition to novels, the incredibly prolific Dumas (some critics calculate his collected output to fill nearly 1,000 volumes) also wrote plays, magazine articles, and travel guides. Dumas’s stories have even been translated into one hundred languages and made into over two hundred film adaptations.

Essential Facts

1. Dumas was always worried about the fact that he was biracial. Someone once insulted him about this fact and he replied, “It is true. My father was a mulatto, my grandmother was a negress, and my great-grandparents were monkeys. In short, sir, my pedigree begins where yours ends.”
2. Dumas did not write his novels alone. He had several assistants who helped him with research. Some even outlined the plots of his novels for him and wrote early drafts. Dumas would then add dialogue and other details.
3. Despite his success, Dumas was often in debt due to spending so much on his mistresses. Though he was married to actress Ida Ferrier, he had at least four illegitimate children.
4. In 2002, French president Jacques Chirac had Dumas’s body exhumed and interred in the same place as Victor Hugo and Voltaire.
5. In 2005, Dumas’s last novel, The Knight of Sainte-Hermine, was sold in France. It was not quite finished at the time of his death, so the last two chapters were ghostwritten by Dumas scholar Claude Schopp.