The Count of Monte Cristo

On the eve of his wedding, a young sailor named Edmond Dantès is wrongly accused of treason and imprisoned for life in the Château d’If, a reputedly impregnable island fortress. After a daring escape, Dantès unearths a treasure revealed to him by another prisoner and devotes the rest of his life to tracking down and punishing the enemies who wronged him, in disguise as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo. Set against the dramatic upheavals of the years after Napoleon, Alexandre Dumas’s epic tale of betrayal and revenge is one of the most thrilling and enduringly popular adventure novels ever written.

ALEXANDRE DUMAS was born in 1802 in France. His father, a general in Napoleon's army, died when Dumas was three years old, leaving Dumas and his mother impoverished. When he turned twenty-one, Dumas moved to Paris, where he worked for the powerful duc d'Orléans. He wrote popular plays and then novels, including The Three Musketeers. In 1851, he fled from his creditors to Brussels and then to Russia, and in 1861, he joined the fight to unite Italy, founding the revolutionary newspaper L'Indipendente. He died in 1870.