Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) was the son of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a general of the Revolutionary army born in Saint-Domingue to a French nobleman and an enslaved woman of African descent. He made his name as a Romantic dramatist in Paris and then, often with collaborators such as Auguste Maquet, produced an enormous body of historical novels, including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. He was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the nineteenth century.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The Three Musketeers follows a poor young gentleman from Gascony through three years of duels, court intrigue and war under Louis XIII, from 1625 to the fall of La Rochelle in 1628. D'Artagnan, eighteen years old, rides to Paris on a comic yellow pony with fifteen crowns, his father's advice and a letter of introduction to M. de Tréville, captain of the King's Musketeers.
