“You have taught more history to the people than all the historians,” said the great historian Jules Michelet to Alexandre Dumas, who was born #OnThisDay in 1802 to an innkeeper’s daughter and a general under Napoleon who was then “the highest-ranking man of mixed African descent ever in a European army.”

Certainly one of the most popular writers who’ve ever lived—his most famous works include The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), The Three Musketeers (1843-1844), and The Man in the Iron Mask (part of Vicomte de Bragellone; 1847-1850)—Dumas was also one of the most prolific authors of all time. It is estimated that all of his works put together come to around 100,000 pages. (As a frame of reference for how astounding that number is, a typical novel comes to 100,000 words.) As you would expect from someone who wrote and wrote (and wrote), it has not been uncommon for new, previously unknown articles and stories by Dumas to be found buried in some 19th century publication or other, and in fact it was only in 2005 that one last novel of Dumas was discovered, edited, and published, titled The Knight of Sainte-Hermine (published in English in 2006 as The Last Cavalier.)

Over 200 film adaptations have been made of works by Dumas.

Like his contemporary Victor Hugo, Dumas began his career with famous successes in the theater, including Henri III and his Court (1829) and Christine (1831). He then not only turned to writing full-time, but with a P.T. Barnumesque flair for self-promotion, he industrialized it.

Dumas hired a workshop of writers to help write and edit his works. His productivity was unbelievable, as Francine Du Plessis Gray explains in her introduction to Penguin Edition of Man in the Iron Mask), and critics like Sainte-Beuve denied his works were *Literature*. The “elite” opinion in 19th century French letters was that Dumas was a “romance-writer” and the most talented of the “second-rate” “amusers”, as chronicled at length in this chapter of The Life and Writings of Alexandre Dumas by Harry A. Spurr. With the public at large, needless to say, Dumas was extremely popular; as Spurr concludes, even when the accusations of plagiarism, writing too fast, and vulgar taste have been considered, all these really aren’t a patch on a writer of 100,000 pages read the whole world over.

Most of Dumas’s fiction consisted of sprawling romantic trilogies and tetralogies set in multiple periods of French history. These include the d’Artagnan Romances set in 17th century France and following the story of the Three Musketeers in the time of Louis XIV and Cardinal Richelieu; the Valois Romances set during France’s Wars of Religion in the late 16th century; and the Marie Antoinette romances set during the French Revolution; however Dumas also wrote novels set in contemporary France and was also a great writer of adventures and sea tales as well. Dumas also wrote numerous nonfiction articles on politics and contemporary events, a posthumously published Grand Dictionary of Cuisine, and in the early 1840s he recruited a group of writers to pen a nonfiction anthology of Celebrated Crimes.

Dumas had a son, also named Alexandre Dumas, who was also a novelist and playwright and whose works were ironically regarded much more highly than those of his father by critics of the day. (So much so that they admitted him into the French Academy in 1876—the ultimate sign of elite approbation.) It is common and convenient to refer to the author of Monte Cristo, etc. as Alexandre Dumas “père” (the father) and the younger one as Alexandre Dumas “fils” (the son.)

His numerous works can be read via Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, or really, wherever books are sold.