Alexandre Dumas' thrilling tale of bravery, brotherhood and the triumph of good over evil, "The Three Musketeers" is translated with an introduction by Richard Pevear in "Penguin Classics". 'All for one, one for all - that is our motto!' Young d'Artagnan arrives in Paris to join King's Louis XIII's elite guards, but almost immediately finds he is duelling with some of the very men he has come to swear allegiance to - Porthos, Athos and Aramis, inseparable friends: the "Three Musketeers". Soon part of their close band, d'Artagnan's loyalty to his new allies puts him in the deadly path of Cardinal Richlieu's machinations, and when the young hero falls in love with the beautiful but inaccessible Constance, he finds himself in a world of murder, conspiracy and lies, with only the Musketeers to depend on. A stirring nineteenth-century tale of friendship and adventure, "The Three Musketeers" continues to be one of the most influential and popular pieces of French literature. In this acclaimed new translation, Richard Pevear's introduction investigates the controversy of Dumas' literary collaborators, and how important serialisation was to the book's success. This edition also includes notes on the text. Alexandre Dumas (1802-70) was a pioneer of the Romantic theatre in France, but in 1839 he turned his attention to writing the novels for which he is best known today, pften using collaborators such as Auguste Maquet to suggest plots or historical background. His most famous works include "The Three Musketeers" (1844), "The Count of Monte Cristo" (1844-5) and "The Man in the Iron Mask" (1847). If you enjoyed "The Three Musketeers", you might like Dumas' "The Man in the Iron Mask", also available in "Penguin Classics".

Author Biography

Alexander Dumas was born in 1802 at Villes-Cotterets. He received very little education but when he entered the household of the future king, Louis-Philippe, he began to read voraciously and then to write. In 1839 he began writing novels dealing with the wars of religion and the Revolution, but he is most remembered for his historical novels, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Richard Pevear, together with his wife Larissa Volokhonsky, has translated Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (winner of the PEB/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize) as well as works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Mikhail Bulgakov. He has also translated a number of works from French, Italian and Greek. Originally from Boston, he now lives in Paris, where he is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris.