Biographie d'Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas (1802-70) was born near Paris, the son of a general in Napoleon's army. He received little formal education and started his adult life in a series of minor clerical jobs, which he got due to the beauty and clarity of his handwriting. But in 1829 he achieved great success with a historical melodrama about the French king Henry III. He had found his forte, and over the next ten years lie wrote a series of extremely successful action-packed plays for the theatre.
In about 1840, however, lie turned his vast imaginative talents to novel-writing. He was even more successful as a novelist than he had been as a playwright. Two of his books became just about the most widely read books of the nineteenth century. These were The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Both were originally serialized in newspapers (which is why each chapter tends to end in a cliff-hanger) and astonishingly, both were written in the same year,1844-5.
Dumas went on turning out lengthy adventure stories, including such famous books as The Black Tulip. Nowadays, his novels are generally considered too long, which is why this Puffin edition has been abridged. In addition to his novels, he wrote travel books, biographies, reminiscences of his huge menagerie of pets, children's books - and even a cookbook! His output seems too large to be possible; and sometimes amounted to a staff of writers.
However, Dumas always supervised the work, and provided the plots, the imaginative details, and the twists and turns of the thrilling adventures. In keeping with the man's nature as a prodigy, Dumas earned an enormous of money from his writing, but was extraordinarily extravagant, dying in near poverty.
