The Conspirators or, The Chevalier d'

Alexandre Dumas

2014-ж. апр. · Simon and Schuster саткан

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Christopher Isherwood was only twenty-one when he began his first novel, All the Conspirators, in 1926; it was published in England two years later. In his introduction to the first American edition (published by New Directions in 1958), the author explained: "[All the Conspirators] records a minor engagement in what Shelley calls 'the great war between the old and young.'" In many ways this novel (like the classic Berlin Stories) is a "period piece" growing out of a particular historical situation--clashes between parents and children are still just as deadly but they are no longer invariably polite and restrained, and there are no longer (as Cyril Connolly once put it) "atrocities witnessed at tea in the drawing-room." But Isherwood's singular perceptions of the older generation holding on and the younger trying to wrench free are as valid today as they were half a century ago.

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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.