Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas the elder — to distinguish him from his novelist son — was one of the most productive writers who ever lived, and travel writing was simply one more outlet for his extraordinary energy.

His travel books are not systematic guides but performances — Dumas in a carriage, on a boat, in a foreign inn, encountering the picturesque and the outrageous with equal relish. He travelled through the Pyrenees, Switzerland, Italy, Russia, and the Caucasus, and his books about these journeys were hugely popular with the French reading public.

Impressions de voyage (a series of several books from the 1830s and 1840s) covered Switzerland and Italy. His account of travels in Russia and the Caucasus, published in the 1850s, was one of the first French books to give a detailed picture of those regions. His Tunisian and Algerian travels reflected the French colonial moment, though Dumas brought more genuine curiosity to the Arab world than most of his contemporaries.

His travel writing shares with his fiction an addiction to the dramatic anecdote, a gift for dialogue, and an absolute refusal to be boring.