The Three Musketeers

Alexandre Dumas, pronounced: [a.lɛk.sɑ̃dʁ dy.ma], born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world. Many of his novels, including The... Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne were originally serialized. He also wrote plays and magazine articles and was a prolific correspondent. Born in poverty, Dumas was the grandson of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave. Alexandre Dumas was born in Villers-Cotterêts in the department of Aisne, in Picardy, France. Dumas' paternal grandparents were Marquis Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman and Général commissaire in the Artillery in the colony of Saint-Domingue and Marie-Cesette Dumas, an Afro-Caribbean Creole of mixed French and African ancestry. Their son, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, married Marie-Louise Élisabeth Labouret, the daughter of an innkeeper.
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The d'Artagnan Romances are a set of three novels by Alexandre Dumas telling the story of the musketeer d'Artagnan from his humble beginnings in Gascony to his death as a marshal of France in the Siege of Maastricht in 1673. Dumas based the life and character of d'Artagnan on the 17th-century... captain of musketeers Charles de Batz-Castelmore, Comte d'Artagnan, and Dumas's portrayal was indebted to the semi-fictionalized memoirs of d'Artagnan written 27 years after the hero's death by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras . The three novels are: Two further sequels to the d'Artagnan books, the novels The Son of Porthos and D'Artagnan Kingmaker, were published respectively in 1883 and 1900. D'Artagnan does not appear in the first novel, which, although written by Paul Mahalin, was published under the pen name "Alexandre Dumas" and is still sold as such. The second novel was supposedly based on one of Dumas's plays. Dumas himself died in 1870.
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Penguin Classics is an imprint published by Penguin Books, a subsidiary of Pearson PLC. They are published in varying editions throughout the world including in the United Kingdom, United States, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, South Africa, and South Korea. Books in this... series are seen by literary critics as important members of the Western canon, though many titles are translated or of non-Western origin; indeed, the series for decades from its creation included only translations, until it eventually incorporated Penguin English Library. The first Penguin Classic was E. V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey, published in 1946, and Rieu went on to become general editor of the series. Rieu sought out literary novelists such as Dorothy Sayers and Robert Graves as translators, believing they would avoid "the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that renders many existing translations repellent to modern taste". Penguin Books has paid particular attention to the design of its books since recruiting German typographer Jan Tschichold in 1947. The early minimalist designs were modernised by Italian art director Germano Facetti, who joined Penguin in 1961.
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