Alexandre Dumas
(1802~1870)
Alexandre Dumas was one of the most famous French writers of the 19th century. Dumas was born in a small village in Villes-Cotterets in the northern part of France. He lived in poverty after his father died when he was 4 years old.
He went to Paris in 1823 and wrote occasionally. His first play Henry III and his Court (1829) was a huge success. After that, he became known as a talented writer and wrote 15 plays before 1843. These included Napoleon Bonaparte (1831) and Antoine (1831). He was also interested in historical novels, so he wrote The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844~1845), and The Man in the Iron Mask (1848). His novels The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo became very popular as soon as they were published.
Dumas wrote more than 250 works and used French history as a source for his imagination. He was buried in his hometown after his death on December 5, 1870, but, in 2002, the French government moved his body to the national cemetery, Panteon, where the country’s national heroes are buried.
The Count of Monte Cristo is an adventure novel about a young man who lived during the French Revolution and who became a scapegoat due to its social period and political conspiracies. Dumas was influenced by the life of a young man named Peuchet and captured readers with him creativity and the exciting events that occur in the story. This novel has been so loved up to the present day that it has been produced as films, plays, dramas, and cartoons all over the world.
Edmond Dantes, a young and talented sailor, becomes the successor to a captain who suddenly dies. Danglars, who is jealous of Dantes’ promotion to captain, plots to thwart Dantes, so Dantes gets arrested by the police at a wedding. Though Villefort knows that Dantes is innocent, Villefort ultimately chooses his own future over that of Dantes, so he condemns Dantes to a prison on an isolated island. While in prison, Dantes slowly begins to spiral into despair. While he spends time in prison not knowing anything at all, he begins to have hope when he meets a prisoner named Faria, who attempts to escape from the prison by digging a tunnel.