First, as is the case for many of his contemporaries, most notably Honoré de Balzac and George Sand, the enormous size of Dumas's opus and a fascination with his personal life have, from the very beginning, proved a handicap to Dumas's prestige in intellectual circles. To be sure, much of the early preoccupation with Dumas's debts and mistresses has given way to serious biographical and literary-historical research and a few broadly interpretative analyses. To date, however, critical commentary on Dumas's works has tended to focus on a limited number of texts, and scholars have yet to come to terms with Dumas's astonishing productivity.
Throughout his long career, Dumas wrote works in virtually every literary genre, sometimes publishing two or more novels simultaneously in serial form. From the nineteenth century to the present, critics have tended to be suspicious of la démesure (excessiveness), and they will often dismiss as facile and unworthy of respect any author who writes a great deal. That attitude is quite apparent in the imaginary conversation Delphine de Girardin included in one of her Letters parisiennes (Parisian Letters, 5 May 1845) to explain why Dumas, like Balzac, failed to get elected to the French Academy: "MM.
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