Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was born in 1802, the son of a French general whose own father was a nobleman and whose mother was an enslaved African woman in Saint-Domingue. Dumas found early work with the Duke of Orléans, then turned to writing plays that succeeded from the start. By the 1840s he'd founded the Théâtre Historique in Paris and was publishing historical adventure novels as serials - The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, The Vicomte of Bragelonne, The Count of Monte Cristo - that made him one of the most widely read French authors of his time. His total published output reached 100,000 pages across genres. After Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's election in 1851, Dumas fell out of favour and spent years in Belgium, Russia, and Italy, where in 1861 he founded a newspaper supporting Italian unification. He returned to Paris in 1864 and died six years later, remembered by one English playwright as the most generous man alive and the most delightfully egotistical, his tongue like a windmill that never stopped.