Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) wrote at industrial scale, with collaborators, for newspapers that paid by the line — which accounts for both the pace of his plots and their length. The Count of Monte Cristo, serialised from 1844, is the most influential revenge story in European fiction, and its ending complicates everything that came before it: after a thousand pages of engineered retribution, the final advice is to wait and to hope. Dumas was the grandson of an enslaved Haitian woman and the son of a general in Napoleon’s army, and faced open racism throughout his career.