My Memoirs by Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas opens his memoirs with the story of his own birth, tracing the proud, tangled legacy of his name back to his extraordinary father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas. Against the backdrop of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, he evokes the general's rise in Italy and Egypt, his courage, his clash with Bonaparte, and the family life of Villers-Cotterêts, where public history and private memory are inseparable. Andrew Lang's introduction frames Dumas as a dazzling but elusive figure, a writer whose life was shaped by imagination as much as fact, and whose early years reveal the richest source of his personality. From there, the memoir turns intimate and heartbreaking. Dumas recounts the night of his father's death, his childhood confusion, his questions about God and heaven, and the moment innocence gives way to grief. He follows the family's ruin after the general's captivity and death, the loss of income and recognition, and Napoleon's refusal to aid the widow and children. Amid village scenes, school troubles, hunting escapades, and adolescent defiance, the young Dumas grows toward manhood, his character formed by loss, resentment, curiosity, and the restless energy that will fuel his later literary life. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.