Joan of Naples: Celebrated Crimes

Alexandre Dumas

Dec 2010 · The Floating Press

About this ebook

Celebrated as one of the masters of historical fiction, Alexandre Dumas, pere wrote such masterworks as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. His series Celebrated Crimes delved into eight historical capers, transgressions, and scandals. This life of Joan of Naples, the 14th century European monarch whose reign and romances were both famously tumultuous, was one of the most popular volumes of the series.

About the author

After an idle youth, Alexandre Dumas went to Paris and spent some years writing. A volume of short stories and some farces were his only productions until 1927, when his play Henri III (1829) became a success and made him famous. It was as a storyteller rather than a playwright, however, that Dumas gained enduring success. Perhaps the most broadly popular of French romantic novelists, Dumas published some 1,200 volumes during his lifetime. These were not all written by him, however, but were the works of a body of collaborators known as "Dumas & Co." Some of his best works were plagiarized. For example, The Three Musketeers (1844) was taken from the Memoirs of Artagnan by an eighteenth-century writer, and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) from Penchet's A Diamond and a Vengeance. At the end of his life, drained of money and sapped by his work, Dumas left Paris and went to live at his son's villa, where he remained until his death.