Alexandre Dumas

He began in the theatre. The newspapers could not print him fast enough. Son of a French general and a Haitian grandmother, Dumas took Paris with Romantic drama, then discovered the serial: musketeers, a count who waits, a tulip, a man in an iron mask, travel books, a hundred thousand pages. He built a theatre, spent a château, sailed with Garibaldi, and kept a workshop of collaborators because one man could not feed that appetite alone. The four friends are the noise. The factory is the author.