French novelist and non-fiction writer (1840-1902)

Zola won scandalous fame at 27 with his novel Thérese Raquin, about a pair of lovers who murder the woman's husband. The book's financial success let him take up fiction full-time, and he began a 20-novel series designed to show -- in a scientific way, he claimed, as species are described -- every aspect of late 19th-century French life. Although each novel is self-contained, their main characters are all members of the two families which give the series its name, The Rougons and the Macquarts. Zola's scheme echoed Balzac's in The Human Comedy, and like Balzac he was interested in exact description, what he called naturalism'. But his morbid and pessimistic nature led him to concentrate on the harsher aspects of human existence, so that his characters often seem less like real human beings than the people dragged into sermons to illustrate the effects of drink, lust or poverty. Outside France, Zola's best-known books are Germinal (1885, about conditions in the coalmines, and including a strike and a major accident), Earth (La Terre, 1887, about subsistence farming), The Belly of Paris (Le ventre de Paris, 1873, about the food-markets of the city), The Boozer (L'assommoir, 1871) and For Women's Delight (Pour le bonheur des dames, 1883, about the staff and customers of a department store).

NANA  (1880) The subject is sex. Nana's mother was a country girl who went to Paris to seek her fortune, became a laundress but was destroyed by drink -- this is the story of The Boozer. Nana grows up as a street-urchin, and later becomes an actress and singer. She is beautiful but corrupt, morally brutalised by her childhood. She sets out systematically to destroy men: Zola thinks of her first as one of the Sirens in myth, drawing men irresistibly to her by the beauty of her voice, and then as a spider, preying on them even as she mates with them. He pities neither Nana nor her victims: like his other novels, this panorama of big-city life is painted entirely in shades of black.

Other books in the series include The Human Beast (La bete humaine) (about the gangs of navvies who built railroads), Money (set among financiers) and The Downfall (Le débacle) (a devastating picture of the 1870 Commune and siege of Paris, which Zola saw as a cleansing operation, ridding the city of the corruption which had led to the misery described in his other books). In his last years he finished the first three books of another series, The Four Gospels: their titles are Fertility, Work and Truth.

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Thérèse Raquin

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest George Gissing, New Grub Street W. Somerset Maugham, Liza of Lambeth Frank Norris, The Pit John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath