Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was a French novelist and dramatist whose historical romances became some of the most widely read works of the nineteenth century. Born in 1802, he was the son of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a French officer of mixed African and European ancestry whose career under the Revolution and Napoleon later fascinated his son. Dumas first achieved success in the theatre before turning increasingly to serial fiction produced for the expanding newspaper and book market.

His best-known works include The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, The Vicomte de Bragelonne and The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas worked with collaborators—most importantly Auguste Maquet—while retaining responsibility for the distinctive narrative voice and dramatic expansion that made the novels famous. He travelled widely, participated in political and cultural causes and spent heavily, repeatedly facing financial problems despite enormous popularity. He died in 1870 at his son’s home near Dieppe.

Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery is the linked novel in which Dumas appears as a historical literary figure within a story crowded with real nineteenth-century writers, conspirators and political actors. His presence suits Eco’s interest in forged documents, popular narrative and the boundary between history and invention—subjects closely connected to the enormous cultural reach of Dumas’s own historical fiction.