Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was the grandson of Marie-Cessette Dumas, an enslaved woman in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), and a French nobleman. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was born into slavery but rose to become a celebrated general in the French Revolutionary Army, one of the highest-ranking men of African descent in any European military of the era.

Raised largely by his mother after his father's early death, the younger Dumas moved to Paris as a young man and worked his way up through literary and theatrical circles, first as a playwright and then as a novelist, quickly establishing a reputation for vivid, fast-paced adventure storytelling.

Dumas became one of the most prolific and widely read authors in the history of world literature, producing hundreds of novels, plays, and other works, often collaborating with assistants to sustain his enormous output. His most celebrated novels, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, both published in 1844, remain among the most translated and adapted works of fiction ever written, and Dumas himself became one of the wealthiest and most famous writers of nineteenth-century Europe, despite facing racial prejudice throughout his career and life in French society.