Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas, also known as Alexandre Dumas pere, was a French novelist and playwright and one of the most widely read French authors, his works translated into many languages. Many of his historical adventure novels were first published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After, and since the early twentieth century many have been adapted into films; he also founded the Theatre Historique in Paris in the 1840s. The son of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, born in Saint-Domingue to a French nobleman and an enslaved African woman, he later fell from political favor after 1851 and spent years abroad in Belgium, Russia and Italy before returning to Paris in 1864.