Alexandre Dumas Works, Novels, Plays, EBooks, Literature

Alexandre Dumas Works & Literature

About Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas Sr. led a life as extravagant and adventurous as those of his characters. Born in Villes-Cotterêts, France, Dumas’s family lived in poverty after his father, who had been a general for Napoleon’s army, died in 1806. After traveling to Paris to find work in 1823, Dumas instantly fell in love with the theatre. Soon, his unique flare for expertly blending historical fact into action-packed sequences made him a breakthrough playwright. Dumas’s career took off when the lifting of press censorships allowed his first serial play, Le Capitaine Paul (1838), to become a major success. Living up to his audacious reputation, in 1830 Dumas served as captain of the National Guard and traveled to Italy. In 1840, he married and soon after divorced his mistress Ida Ferrier after spending her entire dowry. Skillfully employing “cliff-hanger” endings kept his readers hooked and allowed Dumas to grow wealthy. His most famous works are Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844), and Le Comte De Monte-Cristo (1844-45). However, Dumas exhausted his wealth faster than he obtained it. After years spent hiding from his creditors, Dumas emerged in 1851 to found a daily paper in Paris called Le Mousquetaire. In 1858 his travels took him to Russia, and in1860 to Italy, however, the man known as “the king of Paris” couldn’t stay away for long. His deviant behavior led to the mounting of his debts and caused the most famous of his illegitimate children, writer Alexandre Dumas fils, to shun his father and his lifestyle. Dumas died of a stroke on December 5, 1870, at Puys, near Dieppe.