Alexandre Dumas Knowledge Base > Literature > Writers Alexandre Dumas Alexandre Dumas (24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870) was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world. Graduate of Fordham Gabelli School of Business. Splitting time between New York and Russia. Interested in economic forecasting and 19th century Romanticism. Curated Facts Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Man in the Iron Mask, is the most famous French writer of the nineteenth century. × Amazon Results Alexandre Dumas (1824-1895), was a French playwright and novelist, who wrote plays about the problems of the middle class. He was the son of the writer Alexandre Dumas père. His first work was a volume of poetry, Péchés de jeunesse (Sins of Youth). The following year his first novel, Camille, appeared, and the subsequent dramatization of this work established him as a success. Article: Alexandre Dumas: Views on...

Devotees of Dumas, one of the stars of 19th-century French literature, whose remains were transferred amid great pomp to the hallowed tomb of the Panthéon in 2002, insist Maquet was merely a dogsbody whose capacity for hard work was his greatest talent. They claim his only role as one of the great man's many assistants was to provide the basics on which Dumas could then build his masterpieces. Article: Film reignites literary d... a leading academic has cast doubt on how much of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo he actually penned. A new film will also suggest they were largely written by an unsung assistant... He claims that Auguste Jules Maquet was the real "fourth musketeer", the man who actually came up with the plot for the trilogy featuring Porthos, Athos, Aramis. and d'Artagnan. Article: Alexandre Dumas novels pe... All this even though the novels are clearly books of their time. Consider the best known of them, The Three Musketeers.

Long, theatrical, at times preposterous, its pages are filled with improbable coincidence and dialogue worthy of a modern-day bodice-ripper: "Buckingham seized her hand and kissed it passionately. Then he got to his feet and said: If I escape alive I shall see you again before six months have passed, even if I have to set the world ablaze to reach you." But the book, awash with derring-do and sly comedy, is also great fun to read. The Musketeers twirl their mustaches, clank their swords, and dispatch with aplomb the minions of the villainous Cardinal Richelieu. For a long time Dumas was treated with condescension by academia as a mere plebeian entertainer. More recently his reputation has been hampered by the 20th-century credo that endorses spare, analytical writing and minute psychological revelation. Dumas's skills run in quite the opposite direction: instinctive heroes, voluptuous atmosphere, a galloping narrative and breakneck dialogue. But in the past few years academic scholars have shown a renewed interest in the writer.

They point out that before he was 35, Dumas contributed to French literature by laying the foundations of bourgeois drama, and helping to popularize history and create a new kind of Romantic novel. Alexandre Dumas The Worlds' Greatest Author Cliff Reuter The world's greatest story teller Alexandre Dumas 1802-1870 Hey, this dude could really write! Alexandre Dumas is a French author of the 19th century. He wrote over 200 novels and is best known for his timeless classics The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. His uncanny ability to bring historical figures to life is what makes him famous. He introduces the reader to Bonaparte, Catherine De Medici, Charles the 5th, Marie Antoinette and many more. Alexandre Dumas is my favorite author. The majority of his 200 novels are really kick #**@! This guy is so great he even has a candy bar named after one of his books. Everyone knows the motto of the Three Musketeers is "All for one and one for all". You have probably heard of the Count Of Monte Cristo too.

The funny thing is that only a few of his books are continually made in to movies and the other multiple GREAT stories are neglected by Hollywood. I study, collect, read, buy and sell his books. Below is a pictoral history of the Dumas family: He was born in Villes-Cotterï¿½ts, France the son of a French General and innkeepers daughter. His grandfather Alexandre Davie De la Palantiere (a French nobleman) settled in Santo Domingo and married Marie-Cessette Dumas an Afro-Caribbean who had been a black slave in that French colony. Their son, Dumas's father, was educated in France and then joined Napoleon's army as a private under his mothers name of Dumas. He proved him self many times in battle and advanced quickly to the rank General. He became known as "Napoleon's famous black General". He was eventually captured and imprisoned by the British. By this time he had fallen out with Napoleon and in fact Napoleon refused to pay his ransom. He returned to France years later with broken health. After his death in 1806 the family lived in poverty.

The young Alexandre Dumas worked as a notary's clerk in Villers-Cotterï¿½tes and went in 1823 to Paris to find work. Due to his elegant handwriting he secured a position with the Duc d'Orlï¿½ans - later King Louis Philippe. He also found his place in theater and as a publisher of some obscure magazines. An illegitimate son called Alexandre Dumas fils, whose mother, Marie-Catherine Labay, was a dressmaker, was born in 1824. D umas was an omnivorous reader. Especially he was interested in p lays. His first produced drama was LA CHASSE ET L'AMOUR, w ritten with with Adolphe de Leuven and P.J. Rosseau. It opened on S eptember 22, 1835 at Thï¿½ï¿½tre de l'Ambigu-Comique. As a playwright Dumas made his breakthrough with HENRI III ET SA COUR (1829), produced by the Comï¿½die-Franï¿½aise.

The romantic drama about power and love was set in the Renessaince court of Henry III and drew on Louis-Pierre Anquetil's Histoire de France and Pierre de L'Estoile's Memoires-journaux. It gained a huge success and Dumas went on to compose additional plays, of which LA TOUR DE NESLE (1832, The Tower of Nesle) is considered the greatest masterpiece of French melodrama. It was written in collaboration with Frï¿½dï¿½ric Gaullardet. The action centered around the doomed Queen Marguerite de Bourgogne, who had ordered her illegitimate sons to be killed, but who appear into her life twenty years later. He wrote constantly, producing a steady stream of plays, novels, and short stories. "All for one, one for all, that is our device." (from The Three Musketeers) Before 1843 Dumas wrote fifteen plays. Historical novels brought Dumas enormous fortune, but he could spent money faster than he made it. He produced some 250 books with his 73 assistants, especially with the history teacher Auguste Maquet, whom he wisely allowed to work quite independently.

Dumas earned roughly 200,000 francs yearly and received an annual sum of 63,000 francs for 220,000 lines from the newspapers La Presse and the Constitutionel. Maquet often proposed subjects and wrote first drafts for some of Dumas' most famous serial novels, including LES TROIS MOUSQUETAIRES (1844, The Three Musketeers) and LE COMTE DE MONTE-CRISTO (1844-45, The Count of Monte-Cristo). Dumas himself claimed that he only began writing his books when they were already completed in his head. As a master dialogist, Dumas developed character traits, and kept the action moving, and composed the all-important chapter endings - teaser scenes that maintained suspense and readers interest to read more.

The adventures of the three musketeers has inspired many film versions, although the story itself was problematic for American film directors for some decades due to Hollywood's Production Code: d'Artagnan is in love with a married woman, Constance, and has a relationship with Milady de Winter, who actually is Athos' wife, and he feels attraction to Milady's maid, Kitty, whose passionate glances he doesn't first notice. "Then only D'Artagnan remembered the languishing glances of Kitty, her constantly meeting him in the antechamber, the corridor, or on the stairs, those touches of the hand every time she met him, and her deep sighs; but absorbed by his desire to please the great lady, he had disdained the soubrette. He whose game is the eagle takes no heed of the sparrow." The story of the King's Musketeers was continued in Twenty Years After (1845) and The Vicomte Bragelonne (1848-50). The latter has also inspired several film adaptations of the unwanted twin brother of the king, Philippe, imprisoned in Bastille. His face is covered with an iron mask to hide his true identity.

Philippe was "clothed in black and masked by a visor of polished and steel soldered to a helmet of the same nature, which altogether enveloped his whole head. The fire of the heavens cast red reflections upon the polished surface, and these reflections, flying off capriciously, seemed to be angry looks launched by this unfortunate..." Dumas' heroes die romantically in different battles - Porthos is killed by king's men, d'Artagnan is killed in Holland by a stray bullet. At the end of the story, only Aramis is still alive. Dumas' role in the development of the historical novel owes much to a coincidence. The lifting of press censorship in the 1830s gave rise to a rapid spread of newspapers. Editors began to lure readers by entertaining serial novels. Everybody read them, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie, young and old, men and women. Dumas' first true serial novel was LE CAPITAINE PAUL (1838, Captain Paul), a quick rewrite of a play. It was addressed to a female readership and added 5,000 subscribers to the list of Le Siï¿½cle when it was serialized.

Along with Balzac and other writers, he also contributed to Emile de Girardin's weekly, La Mode, which became the voice of an aristocratic and wordly tout-Paris. Duma s lived as adventurously as the heroes of his books, and his way of life created a number of anecdotes. When he was asked to contribute 25 francs to bury a bailiff he gave 50 francs and said: "There you are - bury two of them." He took part in the revolution of July 1830 and became a captain in the National Guard, caught cholera during the epidemic of 1832, and traveled in Italy to recuperate. He married his mistress Ida Ferrier, an actress, in 1840, but he soon separated after having spent her entire dowry. With the money earned from his writings, he built a fantastic chï¿½teau de Monte-Cristo on the outskirts of Paris. In 1850 appeared The Black Tulip, a romantic adventure set in the 17th century Holland.

In the middle of the political struggle for freedom is Cornelius van Baerle, a young man who has devoted himself to tulip-growing. Cornelius is falsely imprisoned for high treason. With the help of Rosa, the daughter of a jailer, he manages to grow a black tulip. Cornelius wins his freedom and hundred thousand guilders in glittering gold pieces as reward for the tulip. "This tulip," continued the Prince, "will therefore bear the name of its producer, and figure in the catalogue under the title, Tulipa nigra Rosa Barlaensis, because of the name Van Baerle, which will henceforth be the name of this damsel." In 1851 Dumas escaped his creditors to Brussels. He spent two years there in exile and then returned to Paris and founded a daily paper called Le Mousquetaire. In 1858 he traveled to Russia and in1860 he went to Italy, where he supported Garibaldi and Italy's struggle for independence (1860-64). He then remained in Naples as a keeper of the museums for four years. After his return to France his debts continued to mount.

Called as "the king of Paris", Dumas earned fortunes and spent them right away on friends, art, and mistresses. He was professed to have had dozens of illegitimate children, but he acknowledged only three. According to a story, when Dumas once found his wife in bed with his good friend Roger de Beauvoir, he said: "It's cold night. Move over and make room for me." Dumas died of a stroke on December 5, 1870, at Puys, near Dieppe. It is claimed that his last words were: "I shall never know how it all comes out now," in which he referred to his unfinished book. Dumas' son Alexandre Dumas fils , became a writer, dramatist, and moralist, who never accepted his father's lifestyle. Dumas did not generally define himself as a black man, and there is not much evidence that he encountered overt racism during his life. However, his works were popular among the 19th-century African-Americans, partly because in The Count of Monte-Cristo, the falsely imprisoned Edmond Dantï¿½s, may be read as a parable of emancipation.

In a shorter work, GEORGES (1843, George), Dumas examined the question of race and colonialism. The main character, a half-French mulatto, leaves Mauritius to be educated in France, and returns to avenge himself for the affronts he had suffered as a boy. Dumas' central works created a romantic fictional history of France, but they also had supernatural elements and characters, that preceded the superheroes of the 20th-century. These stories include LE CHï¿½TEAU D'EPPSTEIN (1844), a ghost story, LES FRï¿½RES CORSE (1844), where Siamese twins, separated at birth, maintain a psychic knowledge of each other's dire fates, ISAAC LAQUEDEM (1853), a Wandering-Jew tale, and LE MENEUR DE LOUPS (1857), where a young man agrees a pact with the Devil. His play, LE VAMPIRE (1851), was a Byronic vampire tale. Dumas' story The Man in the Iron Mask was based on the legend of Louis XIV's twin brother.

The legend also had inspired Voltaire and Victor Hugo's play Les Jumeaux (1839). The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-45) - The protagonist, Edmond Dantï¿½s, is about to marry his sweetheart and become a captain of a vessel. He is framed by three enemies as a Napoleonic conspirator, shortly before Napoleon's dramatic return from Elba in 1815. Dantï¿½s is imprisoned in the Chateau d'If, by the politician Villefort who is anxious to conceal his own father's machinations on behalf of Bonaparte. Educated by the Abbï¿½ Faria, Dantï¿½s remains in the French Alcatraz 14 years, before he manages to escape, in a highly dramatic manner. He flees to the island of Monter Cristo, and locates a fabulous treasure, hidden since the time of Renaissance. As the Count of Monte Cristo and with the wealth of the treasure Dantï¿½s destroys his enemies and shows the wrong side of the bourgeois world.

- The novel originated from Dumas' acquaintance with Jï¿½rï¿½me Bonaparte, Napolï¿½on Bonaparte's brother, whose younger son Dumas took occasionally on short educational journeys. Returning from Elba, Dumas spotted another island, the deserted Monte-Carlo, about which he determined to write a novel in remembrance of the trip. 'Let it be as you wish, my sweet angel' said the Count. 'God has sustained me against my enemies and I see now He does not wish me to end my triumph with repentance. I intended punishing myself, but God has pardoned me! Love me, Haydee! Who knows? Perhaps your love will help me to forget all I do not wish to remember! Come, Haydee!' (from The Count of Monte Cristo) For further reading: Alexandre Dumas pï¿½re by Hippolyte Parigot (1902); The Fourth Musketeer by J. Lucas-Dubreton (1928); The Laughing Mulatto by R. Todd (1940); Alexandre Dumas by A.C.

Bell (1950); Alexandre Dumas: A Great Life in Brief by Andrï¿½ Maurois (1955); The Titans by Andrï¿½ Maurois (1957); The Life and Writings of Alexandre Dumas by Harry A. Spurr (1972); Alexandre Dumas pï¿½re et la Comï¿½die Franï¿½aise by F. Bassan and S. Chevalley (1972); Alexandre Dumas (pï¿½re) by Richard S. Stowe (1976); Alexandre Dumas by F.W.J. Hemmings (1979); 'Missing' Works of Alexandre Dumas, Pere by Douglas Munro (1983); Alexandre Dumas: Genius of Life by Claude Schopp (1989); General Alexandre Dumas: Soldier of the French Revolution by John G.

Gallaher (1997) - Museum: Chateau de Montecristo, 1 avenue Kennedy, 78560 Port-Marly, Yvelines - home of Alexandre Dumas, where he wrote The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo; Musï¿½e Alexandre Dumas, 24 rue Dï¿½moustier, 02600 Villes-Citterï¿½ts - museum devoted to Alexnadre Dumas and Alexandre Dumas fils. - Note: Dumas' novel La Royale Maison de Savoie, which appeared first in 1854 serialized in an Italian magazine, was published again in four volumes. - Suom.: Dumasin romaaneista on suomennettu noin kolmekymmentï¿½, mm. Joel Lehtosen kï¿½ï¿½ntï¿½mï¿½nï¿½ teokset Kirjekyyhkynen, Mestari Aadam Kalabrialainen sekï¿½ Jalmari Finnen kï¿½ï¿½nnï¿½ksinï¿½ Ange Pitou ja Bastiljin valloitus.

Selected works: Alexandre Dumas : About the Author @ Classic Reader Member Login About the Author One of the most famous French writers of the 19th century. Dumas is best known for the historical novels The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, both written within the space of two years, 1844-45, and which belong to the foundation works of popular culture. He was among the first, along with Honoré de Balzac and Eugène Sue, who fully used the possibilities of roman feuilleton, the serial novel. Dumas is credited with revitalizing the historical novel in France, although his abilities as a writer were under dispute from the beginning. Dumas' works are fast-paced adventure tales. They are not faithful to the historical facts, but blend skillfully history and fiction. "'Diable!' he said, after having swallowed the divine preserve. 'I do not know it the result will be as agreeable as you describe, but the thing does not appear to me as palatable as you say.' --'Because your palates has not yet been attuned to the sublimity of the substances it flavours.

Tell me, the first time you tasted oysters, tea, porter, truffels, and sundry other dainties which you now adore, did you like them? Could you comprehend how the Romans stuffed their pheasants with assaf?tida, and the Chinese eat swallows' nests? Eh? no! Well, it is the same with hashish; only eat for a week and nothing in the world will seem to you to equal the delicacy of its flavor, which now appears to you flat and distasteful. Let us now go into the adjoining chamber, which is your apartment, and Ali will bring us coffee and pipes.'" (from The Count of Monte Cristo) Alexandre Dumas was born in Villes-Cotter�ts, France. His grandfather was a French nobleman, who had settled in Santo Domingo; his paternal grandmother, Marie-Cessette, was an Afro-Caribbean, who had been a black slave in the French colony. Dumas's father was a general in Napoleon's army, who had fallen out of favor. After his death in 1806 the family lived in poverty.

Dumas worked as a notary's clerk in Villers-Cotter�tes and went in 1823 to Paris to find work. Due to his elegant handwriting he secured a position with the Duc d'Orléans - later King Louis Philippe. He also found his place in theater and as a publisher of some obscure magazines. An illegitimate son called Alexandre Dumas fils, whose mother, Marie-Catherine Labay, was a dressmaker, was born in 1824. Dumas was an omnivorous reader. Especially he was interested in plays. His first produced drama was La Chasse et L'Amour, written with with Adolphe de Leuven and P.J. Rosseau. It opened on September 22, 1835 at Thé�tre de l'Ambigu-Comique. As a playwright Dumas made his breakthrough with Henri III et sa Cour (1829), produced by the Comédie-Fran�aise.

The romantic drama about power and love was set in the Renessaince court of Henry III and drew on Louis-Pierre Anquetil's Histoire de France and Pierre de L'Estoile's Memoires-journaux. It gained a huge success and Dumas went on to compose additional plays, of which La Tour de Nesle (1832, The Tower of Nesle) is considered the greatest masterpiece of French melodrama. It was written in collaboration with Frédéric Gaullardet. The action centered around the doomed Queen Marguerite de Bourgogne, who had ordered her illegitimate sons to be killed, but who appear into her life twenty years later. He wrote constantly, producing a steady stream of plays, novels, and short stories. "All for one, one for all, that is our device." (from The Three Musketeers) Before 1843 Dumas wrote fifteen plays. Historical novels brought Dumas enormous fortune, but he could spent money faster than he made it. He produced some 250 books with his 73 assistants, especially with the history teacher Auguste Maquet, whom he wisely allowed to work quite independently.

Dumas earned roughly 200,000 francs yearly and received an annual sum of 63,000 francs for 220,000 lines from the newspapers La Presse and the Constitutionel. Maquet often proposed subjects and wrote first drafts for some of Dumas' most famous serial novels, including Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844, The Three Musketeers) and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844-45, The Count of Monte-Cristo). Dumas himself claimed that he only began writing his books when they were already completed in his head. As a master dialogist, Dumas developed character traits, and kept the action moving, and composed the all-important chapter endings - teaser scenes that maintained suspense and readers interest to read more.

The adventures of the three musketeers has inspired many film versions, although the story itself was problematic for American film directors for some decades due to Hollywood's Production Code: d'Artagnan is in love with a married woman, Constance, and has a relationship with Milady de Winter, who actually is Athos' wife, and he feels attraction to Milady's maid, Kitty, whose passionate glances he doesn't first notice. "Then only D'Artagnan remembered the languishing glances of Kitty, her constantly meeting him in the antechamber, the corridor, or on the stairs, those touches of the hand every time she met him, and her deep sighs; but absorbed by his desire to please the great lady, he had disdained the soubrette. He whose game is the eagle takes no heed of the sparrow." The story of the King's Musketeers was continued in Twenty Years After, The Vicomte Bragelonne, Louise de la Valliérre, and The Man in the Iron Mask. The last story has also inspired several film adaptations of the unwanted twin brother of the king, Philippe, imprisoned in Bastille.

His face is covered with an iron mask to hide his true identity. Philippe was "clothed in black and masked by a visor of polished and steel soldered to a helmet of the same nature, which altogether enveloped his whole head. The fire of the heavens cast red reflections upon the polished surface, and these reflections, flying off capriciously, seemed to be angry looks launched by this unfortunate..." Dumas' heroes die romantically in different battles - Porthos is killed by king's men, d'Artagnan is killed in Holland by a stray bullet. At the end of the story, only Aramis is still alive. Dumas' role in the development of the historical novel owes much to a coincidence. The lifting of press censorship in the 1830s gave rise to a rapid spread of newspapers. Editors began to lure readers by entertaining serial novels. Everybody read them, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie, young and old, men and women. Dumas' first true serial novel was Le Capitaine Paul (1838, Captain Paul), a quick rewrite of a play.

It was addressed to a female readership and added 5,000 subscribers to the list of Le Siècle when it was serialized. Along with Balzac and other writers, he also contributed to Emile de Girardin's weekly, La Mode, which became the voice of an aristocratic and wordly tout-Paris. Dumas lived as adventurously as the heroes of his books, and his way of life created a number of anecdotes. When he was asked to contribute 25 francs to bury a bailiff he gave 50 francs and said: "There you are - bury two of them." He took part in the revolution of July 1830 and became a captain in the National Guard, caught cholera during the epidemic of 1832, and traveled in Italy to recuperate. He married his mistress Ida Ferrier, an actress, in 1840, but he soon separated after having spent her entire dowry. With the money earned from his writings, he built a fantastic ch�teau de Monte-Cristo on the outskirts of Paris. In 1850 appeared The Black Tulip, a romantic adventure set in the 17th century Holland.

In the middle of the political struggle for freedom is Cornelius van Baerle, a young man who has devoted himself to tulip-growing. Cornelius is falsely imprisoned for high treason. With the help of Rosa, the daughter of a jailer, he manages to grow a black tulip. Cornelius wins his freedom and hundred thousand guilders in glittering gold pieces as reward for the tulip. "This tulip," continued the Prince, "will therefore bear the name of its producer, and figure in the catalogue under the title, Tulipa nigra Rosa Barlaensis, because of the name Van Baerle, which will henceforth be the name of this damsel." In 1851 Dumas escaped his creditors to Brussels. He spent two years there in exile and then returned to Paris and founded a daily paper called Le Mousquetaire. In 1858 he traveled to Russia and in1860 he went to Italy, where he supported Garibaldi and Italy's struggle for independence (1860-64). He then remained in Naples as a keeper of the museums for four years. After his return to France his debts continued to mount.

Called as "the king of Paris", Dumas earned fortunes and spent them right away on friends, art, and mistresses. He was professed to have had dozens of illegitimate children, but he acknowledged only three. According to a story, when Dumas once found his wife in bed with his good friend Roger de Beauvoir, he said: "It's cold night. Move over and make room for me." Dumas died of a stroke on December 5, 1870, at Puys, near Dieppe. It is claimed that his last words were: "I shall never know how it all comes out now," in which he referred to his unfinished book. Dumas' son Alexandre Dumas fils, became a writer, dramatist, and moralist, who never accepted his father's lifestyle. Dumas did not generally define himself as a black man, and there is not much evidence that he encountered overt racism during his life. However, his works were popular among the 19th-century African-Americans, partly because in The Count of Monte-Cristo, the falsely imprisoned Edmond Dantès, may be read as a parable of emancipation.

In a shorter work, Georges (1843, George), Dumas examined the question of race and colonialism. The main character, a half-French mulatto, leaves Mauritius to be educated in France, and returns to avenge himself for the affronts he had suffered as a boy. Dumas' central works created a romantic fictional history of France, but they also had supernatural elements and characters, that preceded the superheroes of the 20th-century. These stories include Le Château d'Eppstein (1844), a ghost story, Les Frères Corse (1844), where Siamese twins, separated at birth, maintain a psychic knowledge of each other's dire fates, Isaac Laquedem (1853), a Wandering-Jew tale, and Le Meneur de Loups (1857), where a young man agrees a pact with the Devil. His play, Le Vampire (1851), was a Byronic vampire tale. Dumas' story The Man in the Iron Mask was based on the legend of Louis XIV's twin brother. The legend also had inspired Voltaire and Victor Hugo's play Les Jumeaux (1839).

Most author biographies courtesy of Author's Calendar . Used with permission. The Three Musketeers. The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written: Alexandre Dumas, Edy Legrand: 9781111740863: Amazon.com: Books The Three Musketeers. The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Page 1 of 1 Start over Sponsored Products are advertisements for products sold by merchants on Amazon.com. When you click on a Sponsored Product ad, you will be taken to an Amazon detail page where you can learn more about the product and purchase it. To learn more about Amazon Sponsored Products, click here . Deadly Stillwater: A compelling crime thriller (Mac McRyan Mystery Series Book) Roger Stelljes Two girls snatched off the streets in broad daylight - a gripping and thrilling mystery that stops you in your tracks! NY Times Bestselling Series.

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Full of intrigue, swordplay, and revenge, it is the story of d'Artagnan, a young nobleman who travels to Paris in hopes of joining the Musketeers, a group of swashbuckling adventurers who serve King Louis XIII. His wit and fighting ability make d'Artagnan a welcome addition to their ranks, and together the four young men work to foil the King's evil rival, Cardinal Richelieu. Despite the period setting and constant violence, the story captures and sustains the reader's interest as the Musketeers vanquish the villains. The novel by Alexandre Dumas pere was published in French as Les Trois Mousquetaires in 1844. A historical romance, it relates the adventures of four fictional swashbuckling heroes who lived during the reigns of the French kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV. At the beginning of the story D'Artagnan arrives in Paris from Gascony and becomes embroiled in three duels with the three musketeers Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.

The four become such close friends that when D'Artagnan serves an apprenticeship as a cadet, which he must do before he can become a musketeer, each of his friends takes turns sharing guard duty with him. The daring escapades of the four comrades are played out against a background of court intrigue involving the powerful Cardinal Richelieu. Dumas wrote two sequels that concerned D'Artagnan and the three musketeers: Vingt Ans apres (1845; Twenty Years After) and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne ou dix ans plus tard (1848-50; The Vicomte de Bragelonne; or, Ten Years Later). 1000+ images about The Three Musketeers on Pinterest | Baroque, Form of and Map of france Forward Inspired by a production of "Hamlet," Alexandre Dumas decided to be a dramatist. After much success, he decided to write novels in serial, eventually publishing "The Three Musketeers" among many other novels and becoming one of the most prolific and popular French writers of the 19th century.

His innovative style combined elements of the historical novel with the humor, wit, and action of the Romance. See More Three Musketeers: Alexandre Dumas: Mass Market: 9780553213379: Powell's Books Three Musketeers Ships in 1 to 3 days Qty Publisher Comments From Alexandre Dumas, a precise and candid description of his particular view of history: I start by devising a story. I try to make it romantic, moving, dramatic, and when scope has been found for the emotions and the imagination, I search through the annals of the past to find a frame in which to set it; and it has never happened that history has failed to provide this frame, so exactly adjusted to the subject that it seemed it was not a case of the frame being made for the picture, but that the picture had been made to fit the frame. This is the point of view of the historical novelist, who approaches the past as theater-the unending melodrama of saints and sinners, and who knows that history, eternally surprising, inspiring, disheartening, sometimes described as “one damn thing after another,” will never fail him. It is all there.

And it is all there to be used. Dumas was in his early forties when he wrote The Three Musketeers, an age when novelists are believed to be entering their best creative years. He is traditionally described as “a man of vast republican sympathies,” which, in contemporary terms, made him a believer in democracy, equality, and the rights of man. He had fought in the streets of Paris during the July revolution of 1830; would man the barricades in 1848; would aid Garibaldi, with guns and journalism, in the struggle for Italian independence in 1860. Such politics came to him by inclination, and by birth. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie, had taken the name of his African slave mother, Marie Dumas, and spent the early years of his life on the island of Santo Domingo. When the French Revolution made it possible for men without wealth or social connections to rise to power, the soldier Alexandre Dumas became General Alexandre Dumas, commanding the Army of the Alps in 1794, serving under Napoleon Bonaparte in Italy, and later in Egypt.

But his relationship with Bonaparte deteriorated; his health was destroyed by two years in an Italian prison; and he died, a broken man, in 1806. His son, in time the novelist Dumas, was then four years old, but he would be told of his fathers life, and he knew what it meant. By 1844, France was ruled by Louis-Philippe, duc dOrleans, a constitutional monarch known as “the bourgeois king,” who presided over the golden age of the French bourgeoisie, a propertied class animated by the slogan “Enrichissez-vous!” (Enrich yourselves!) This was a period of transition, when corrupt capitalism was opposed by passionate idealism-the age of monarchy was dying, the age of democracy was just being born. The best insight into the period is to be found in the novels of Honoré de Balzac-Dumass fierce literary rival. Balzac was virtually the same age as Dumas, and, like Dumas, rose from social obscurity and penury by producing a huge volume of work at an extraordinary pace.

But Balzac wrote about contemporary life-the vanity, corruption and sexual politics of Paris in the 1840s-and was, throughout his fiction, essentially a novelist of vice. Dumas, on the other hand, was a novelist of virtue, though he had to go back two hundred years to find it. Setting The Three Musketeers in the year 1625-at that distance, a contemporary American novelist might use the revolution of 1776-Dumas was summoning up a remote and heroic era. Yes, it was all different back then. Better. Still, it may be worth remembering that Dumass musketeers are proud, courageous men, men without inherited money or the support of prominent family, who must fight their way through a world of political intrigue dominated by predatory, immoral people who scheme and connive, who will do virtually anything, to keep their wealth and position. So, if it is about anything, The Three Musketeers is about betrayal, fidelity, and, like almost all genre fiction, it is about honor. Honor lost, honor gained, honor maintained at the cost of life itself.

By 1894, the sale of Dumass works totaled three million books and eight million serials. The Three Musketeers, the first book of the dArtagnan trilogy, with Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne to follow, appeared in installments in the journal Le Siècle from March to July in 1844. It was written with help of a collaborator, Auguste Maquet, who also participated in the writing of The Count of Monte Cristo. Maquet would later claim significant authorship, and haul Dumas into court. Dumas was accused, as well, of plagiarism, having used The Memoirs of Monsieur dArtagnan, by one Courtilz de Sandras, published in Cologne in 1701, as source material. There he found not only dArtagnan but Athos, Porthos, and Aramis; Tréville and his musketeers; Milady and her maid; and the Cardinalist Guards. From the annals of French history, he took the machinations, real or reputed, involving Louis XIII, Anne of Austria, Cardinal Richelieu, and the duke of Buckingham.

Then he threw out whatever reality he found inconvenient and wrote what he liked. In the real world of Europe in 1625, the continent was being torn apart by the Thirty Years War-a rather pallid name that obscures the cruel and brutal nature of its reality. Fighting on behalf of royal houses in conflict over religious issues and rights of succession, mercenary armies were paid by the right of pillage and ravaged the countryside, a strategy described as “war supports the war.” In France, French Catholics suppressed a French Protestant minority, the Huguenots, who were supported by English Protestant money and arms. Serving as virtual regent for a weak king Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu was perhaps the greatest political figure of his time. Famously eloquent, determined and brilliant, Richelieu was a deeply ambitious man, but a devoted and faithful servant of king and country. A popular novelist, however, must produce an archvillain, and Dumas gave the job to Richelieu. As the servant of Dumass fictional requirements, Richelieu is merely political on the surface, as he undertakes a series of intrigues in a struggle for power with the king or with his English Protestant enemy, Buckingham.

In The Three Musketeers, Richelieu is discovered to have deeper motives, a lust for revenge inspired by a romantic slight-a spurned advance-and, in general, by sexual jealousy. The cardinal, according to Dumas, was in love with the queen, Anne of Austria. The reader of 1844, hurrying off to buy this weeks chapter in Le Siècle, likely suspected as much. Serialized fiction read as a novel can, at times, be a slightly bumpy ride. The twists and turns of the story are intended not only to keep the reader reading, but to keep the reader buying. Thus the plot tends toward precipitous dives and breathtaking ascents, as peril and escape follow each other at narrow intervals, characters disappear and are brought back to life, and what seemed like the central crisis of the narrative is suddenly resolved, to be replaced by a second crisis. The perfidious Cardinal Richelieu is a good example of this principle at work. Hes a useful éminence grise at the beginning of the novel, as Cardinalist guards fight the kings faithful musketeers.

But, when its time for the story to end, hes too historical a figure to be vanquished with all the force that the conclusion of a romantic adventure demands. Thus the role of villain is shifted to Milady; the story can then take its chilling and violent turn; and justice, when it is at last achieved, can be, to say the least, severe. Since writers of serials wrote for a weekly deadline, there was no such thing as regret or revision, and the reader may see rather more of the novels scaffolding than the author would like. Dumas, characteristically, solved this problem with talent, and produced the best writing in The Three Musketeers in the latter third of the novel, for example the combination of battle and picnic at the Bastion Saint Gervais, during the attack on the Protestant stronghold at La Rochelle.

This is easily one of the most insouciant scenes in all of literature, as the musketeers, intent on winning a tavern bet, occupy the bastion; sip wine; discuss matters of love and strategy; push a wall over on a raiding party; use the dead as mock defenders; and, finally, after four-hundred pages of action and intrigue, actually fire muskets! This is but one pleasure among many. There is, throughout The Three Musketeers, a vast and magnanimous intelligence at work. The critic Jules Michelet described Alexandre Dumas as “an inextinguishable volcano,” and “one of the forces of nature.” He was certainly that. Born to write, and born to write about mythic times and mythic deeds, Dumas loved his characters and the elaborate story he fashioned for them. This is a telling trait in a novelist, the reader instinctively feels it, so gives himself to the story, lives in the time and place of its setting, and escapes, as surely as dArtagnan ever escaped, from the drone of daily existence. Thats the job of romantic fiction and its done in The Three Musketeers on virtually every page.

“All for one, and one for all!” And all for us. Synopsis It's "one for all and all for one!" as D'Artagnan and his three pals follow a course of swashbuckling intrigue and adventure in 17th-centry France. From the Trade Paperback edition. Synopsis It's "one for all and all for one!" as D'Artagnan and his three pals follow a course of swashbuckling intrigue and adventure in 17th-centry France. From the Trade Paperback edition. About the Author Alexandre Dumas, who lived a life as dramatic as any depicted in his more than three hundred volumes of plays, novels, travel books, and memoirs, was born on July 24, 1802, in the town of Villers-Cotterêts, some fifty miles from Paris. He was the third child of Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie (who took the name of Dumas), a nobleman who distinguished himself as one of Napoleon's most brilliant generals, and Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Labouret.

Following General Dumas's death in 1806 the family faced precarious financial circumstances, yet Mme. Dumas scrimped to pay for her son's private schooling. Unfortunately he proved an indifferent student who excelled in but one subject: penmanship. In 1816, at the age of fourteen, Dumas found employment as a clerk with a local notary to help support the family. A growing interest in theater brought him to Paris in 1822, where he met François-Joseph Talma, the great French tragedian, and resolved to become a playwright. Meanwhile the passionate Dumas fell in love with Catherine Labay, a seamstress by whom he had a son. (Though he had numerous mistresses in his lifetime Dumas married only once, but the union did not last.) While working as a scribe for the duc d'Orléans (later King Louis-Philippe) Dumas collaborated on a one-act vaudeville, La Chasse et l'amour ( The Chase and Love, 1825). But it was not until 1827, after attending a British performance of Hamlet, that Dumas discovered a direction for his dramas.

'For the first time in the theater I was seeing true passions motivating men and women of flesh and blood,' he recalled. 'From this time on, but only then, did I have an idea of what the theater could be.' Dumas achieved instant fame on February 11, 1829, with the triumphant opening of Henri III et sa cour (Henry III and His Court). An innovative and influential play generally regarded as the first French drama of the Romantic movement, it broke with the staid precepts of Neoclassicism that had been imposed on the Paris stage for more than a century. Briefly involved as a republican partisan in the July Revolution of 1830, Dumas soon resumed playwriting and over the next decade turned out a number of historical melodramas that electrified audiences. Two of these works—Antony (1831) and La Tour de Nesle (The Tower of Nesle, 1832)—stand out as milestones in the history of nineteenth-century French theater. In disfavor with the new monarch, Louis-Philippe, because of his republican sympathies, Dumas left France for a time.

In 1832 he set out on a tour of Switzerland, chronicling his adventures in Impressions de voyage: En Suisse ( Travels in Switzerland, 1834-1837); over the years he produced many travelogues about subsequent journeys through France, Italy, Russia, and other countries. Around 1840 Dumas embarked upon a series of historical romances inspired by both his love of French history and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. In collaboration with Auguste Maquet, he serialized Le Chevalier d'Harmental in the newspaper Le Siècle in 1842. Part history, intrigue, adventure, and romance, it is widely regarded as the first of Dumas's great novels. The two subsequently worked together on a steady stream of books, most of which were published serially in Parisian tabloids and eagerly read by the public.

He is best known for the celebrated d'Artagnan trilogy—Les trois mousquetaires ( The Three Musketeers, 1844), Vingt ans après (Twenty Years After, 1845) and Dix ans plus tarde ou le Vicomte de Bragelonne ( Ten Years Later; or The Viscount of Bragelonne, 1848-1850)—and the so-called Valois romances—La Reine Margot (Queen Margot, 1845), La Dame de Monsoreau ( The Lady of Monsoreau, 1846), and Les Quarante-cinc ( The Forty-Five Guardsmen, 1848). Yet perhaps his greatest success was Le Comte de Monte Cristo ( The Count of Monte Cristo), which appeared in installments in Le Journal des debats from 1844 to 1845.

A final tetralogy marked the end of their partnership: Mmoires d'un medecin: Joseph Balsamo ( Memoirs of a Physician, 1846-1848), Le Collier de la reine ( The Queen's Necklace, 1849-1850), Ange Pitou ( Taking the Bastille, 1853), and La Comtesse de Charny ( The Countess de Charny, 1852-1855). In 1847, at the height of his fame, Dumas assumed the role of impresario. Hoping to reap huge profits, he inaugurated the new Theatre Historique as a vehicle for staging dramatizations of his historical novels. The same year he completed construction of a lavish residence in the quiet hamlet of Marly-le-Roi. Called Le Château de Monte Cristo, it was home to a menagerie of exotic pets and a parade of freeloaders until 1850, when Dumas's theater failed and he faced bankruptcy.

Fleeing temporarily to Belgium in order to avoid creditors, Dumas returned to Paris in 1853, shortly after the appearance of the initial volumes of Mes Memoires ( My Memoirs, 1852). Over the next years he founded the newspaper Le Mousquetaire, for which he wrote much of the copy, as well as the literary weekly Le Monte Cristo, but his finances never recovered. In 1858 he traveled to Russia, eventually publishing two new episodes of Impressions de voyage: Le Caucase (Adventures in the Caucasus, 1859) and En Russie (Travels in Russia, 1865). The final decade of Dumas's life began with customary high adventure. In 1860 he met Garibaldi and was swept up into the cause of Italian independence. After four years in Naples publishing the bilingual paper L'Independant/L'Indipendente, Dumas returned to Paris in 1864.

In 1867 he began a flamboyant liaison with Ada Menken, a young American actress who dubbed him 'the king of romance.' The same year marked the appearance of a last novel, La Terreur Prussiene (The Prussian Terror). Dumas's final play, Les Blancs et les Bleus (The Whites and the Blues), opened in Paris in 1869. Alexandre Dumas died penniless but cheerful on December 5, 1870, saying of death: 'I shall tell her a story, and she will be kind to me.' One hundred years later his biographer Andre Maurois paid him this tribute: 'Dumas was a hero out of Dumas. As strong as Porthos, as adroit as d'Artagnan, as generous as Edmond Dantes, this superb giant strode across the nineteenth century breaking down doors with his shoulder, sweeping women away in his arms, and earning fortunes only to squander them promptly in dissipation. For forty years he filled the newspapers with his prose, the stage with his dramas, the world with his clamor. Never did he know a moment of doubt or an instant of despair.

He turned his own existence into the finest of his novels.' From the Trade Paperback edition. What Our Readers Are Saying

Question: Which 19th century French novelist wrote books about "The Three Musketeers"?
Answer: Alexandre Dumas