Dumas' most popular novel, The Three Musketeers, has long been a favorite with children, and its heroes are well-known from many a film and TV adaptation. Set in France in the seventeenth century, it follows the fortunes of d'Artagnan, a poor Gascon gentleman, who arrives in Paris to join the King's Musketeers and is befriended by three of them, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, with whom he embarks on a career of adventure and romance. Dumas is a brilliant story-teller: inexhaustibly inventive, a master of dialogue, and with a free sense of drama and of historical period, he seizes the reader's attention on the first page and holds it to the last. Everyman's Library reprints the first, and the best, English translation, by William Barrow.