Émile Zola
1840–1902
Biography
Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840 and died there in 1902. He was a French novelist, journalist and playwright, and he became the best-known practitioner of literary naturalism. His long series of novels, the Rougon-Macquart cycle, follows one family through the Second Empire and the years after it. He wrote with careful, documentary observation and argued that heredity and surroundings shape how people live.
Zola was also a public figure. In 1898 his open letter J'Accuse...! defended the army officer Alfred Dreyfus, who had been falsely convicted of treason, and the letter made Zola a central figure in the affair. He was found guilty of libel over it and spent about a year in exile in England. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and again in 1902.
The site holds Germinal, first published in 1885. It follows Étienne Lantier, a young man who takes work in a coal mine in northern France and is drawn into a miners' strike. The book shows the hard and dangerous life underground and the anger it breeds, and it is widely regarded as one of Zola's strongest novels. Readers who meet it here meet the naturalist method at its most forceful.
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Books
Germinal
by Émile Zola
Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola's masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel – an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in…
Summary from Wikipedia: Germinal (novel) (CC BY-SA 4.0)