Alexandre Dumas

Born in 1802 in Villers-Cotterets, a small town northeast of Paris, Dumas was the grandson of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave. His father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, had been one of Napoleon's most daring commanders but died in disgrace when Alexandre was three, leaving the family in poverty. The young Dumas arrived in Paris at twenty with almost no education, got a clerk's job on the strength of his handwriting, and taught himself literature at the public library. His play Henri III and His Court (1829) made him famous overnight and launched the Romantic revolution in French theater alongside Victor Hugo. He turned to prose and became the most prolific storyteller of the nineteenth century, publishing The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-1846) in serial installments that kept all of France in suspense. He employed collaborators, most notably Auguste Maquet, who plotted and drafted while Dumas rewrote every line in his own exuberant voice. He earned millions and spent them faster, building a Renaissance chateau called Monte-Cristo that bankrupted him within years. He fathered at least four illegitimate children, traveled restlessly, and joined Garibaldi's campaign in Sicily. He died on December 5, 1870, at his son's house near Dieppe, and in 2002 his remains were transferred to the Pantheon.

In September 1827, Dumas watched an English troupe perform Hamlet at the Odéon, Harriet Smithson wild and undone as Ophelia. French tragedians only declaimed; these actors seemed to suffer in real time. He walked out determined to write drama that breathed like that, and two years later Henri III made him famous.