The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

Tom Reiss

#49 of 3,809 books · #26 in Biography & Memoir

Won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography (2013) and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography (2013). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 3 other awards.

The Black Count won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2013. The Three Musketeers! The Count of Monte Cristo! The stories of course are fiction. But here a prize-winning author shows us that the inspiration for the swashbuckling stories was, in fact, Dumas's own father, Alex - the son of a marquis and a black slave. He achieved a giddy ascent from private in the Dragoons to the rank of general; an outsider who had grown up among slaves, he was all for Liberty and Equality. So how did such this extraordinary man get erased by history? Why are there no statues of 'Monsieur Humanity' as his troops called him? The Black Count uncovers what happened and the role Napoleon played in Dumas's downfall. By walking the same ground as Dumas - from Haiti to the Pyramids, Paris to the prison cell at Taranto – Reiss, like the novelist before him, triumphantly resurrects this forgotten hero.