Alexandre Dumas fils

Alexandre Dumas fils (1824–1895) was a French playwright and novelist, the son of the author of The Three Musketeers. His novel The Lady of the Camellias (1848), the story of a courtesan and the young man who loves her, scandalised and conquered Paris, and was adapted by the author himself into the stage play La Dame aux Camélias.

The work, fusing romantic passion and moral reformism, became the basis of Verdi's opera La Traviata, and was the drama that established the author's fame. Elected to the Académie française in 1874, Dumas fils turned his enormous success to the theatre of social questions — marriage, prostitution, paternity — which dominated his later plays.