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The last of Alexandre Dumas's many mistresses, the American actress Adah Menken, called him ""the king of romance."" She was not thinking only of his immensely popular novels The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo - everything about Dumas was touched with the spirit of romance, and it is that spirit which this exhilarating biography captures. There was romance in Dumas's ori­gins. He grew up in the country, the son of a general who fought under Napoleon in Egypt and Italy and whose own parents were a French marquis and a slave from Haiti. As a boy, Dumas's closest friends were local poachers and a gardener whom he once watched cut open a grass snake to lib­erate a frog. The world was full of magical possibilities, and, in his twen­ties, after moving to Paris and working as a clerk under the Duc d'Orleans, Dumas established himself, with Victor Hugo, as one of the leading Romantic playwrights. In its scope and richness, Dumas's life bears comparison to those of his fictional heroes. Drawing on Dumas's memoirs and surviving correspon­dence, Professor Hemmings constructs a fascinating story, first published in 1979, of a writer whose novels continue to excite our imagi­nation.

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9781448205271

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Frederick William John Hemmings was born in Southampton in 1920. Hemmings served in the Second World War, decrypting German codes in the Army Intelligence Corps, but in 1946 he returned to academic life in Oxford, completing his DPhil in 1949, a groundbreaking study that was published the following year by Oxford University Press: The Russian Novel in France 1884-1914. Hemmings made his mark as a pioneer of Zola studies and is known as the foremost Zola critic in the English-speaking world. Further studies on Zola and Stendhal were published in later years, as were books on two other major 19th-century French writers: The King of Romance: A Portrait of Alexandre Dumas (1979) and Baudelaire the Damned (1982). This project of Balzacian and Zolaesque proportions was realised all the more remarkably during a busy nine-year term of office as head of the French department at Leicester University, where he was a hugely respected literary scholar. Hemmings was twice married and left behind one son and one daughter when he died in Leicester in 1997.

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