Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was the son of Marie Louis Labouret and General Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie. Dumas’s father—and, in turn, Dumas himself—was of mixed race because Dumas’s grandfather had a child out of wedlock with an enslaved Haitian woman. Although racism against Black people was ubiquitous in France, Dumas’s father still managed to achieve a high rank in the European Army, partially because of his father’s status and partially because of his own accomplishments. Because Dumas’s father was an aristocrat, he was able to help his son become a writer by apprenticing him to Louis-Phillipe, Duke of Orléans, who was a writer himself. By age 27, Dumas had already published his first play Henry III and His Court, which was a great success. After writing a number of plays, Dumas eventually tried his hand at the novel. Eventually, in 1836, he published his first novel The Countess of Salisbury, in serial form; he published it as a single volume later in 1839. Throughout his life, Alexandre Dumas would prove to be highly prolific; he wrote over 100,000 pages that made it to print. Those 100,000 pages spanned many genres, from travel books to magazine articles to short stories to novels. However, his literary legacy is primarily due to The Three Musketeers (1844) and its sequels, as well as The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–1845). Dumas died in 1870 due to natural causes. At the time of his death, he had lost some of his popularity, but in subsequent years he became one of France’s most beloved and recognizable authors.