Emile Zola

Émile François Zola was a renowned French author, journalist, playwright, and advocate of the naturalism literary school. He was born in 1840 in Paris, France, to an Italian engineer father, Francesco Zola, and a French housewife mother, Emilie Aubert. Zola is widely regarded as the most important example of the literary school of naturalism and played a significant role in France's political liberalization.

Zola's naturalism is a style that traces philosophically to Auguste Comte's positivism, but also to physiologist Claude Bernard and historian Hippolyte Taine. His book, The Experimental Novel, is considered a naturalistic novel and one of the key works of the style. Zola's writing helped to inspire the concepts of heredity, social Manicheanism, and idealistic socialism. More than half of Zola's novels were part of a set of 20 books collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart, which traces the "environmental" influences of violence, alcohol, and prostitution in France's Second Empire.

Zola is particularly famous for writing the Rougon-Macquart series, Three Cities series, Four Social series, and numerous standalone novels, short story collections, novellas, nonfiction, and anthologies. His works resonate with those of Nadar, Manet, and subsequently Flaubert. Zola's novel, L'Œuvre (The Masterpiece, 1886), caused a rift in his friendship with Paul Cézanne due to its fictionalized depiction of Cézanne and the Bohemian life of painters.

From 1877 with the publication of L'Assommoir, Émile Zola became wealthy, better paid than Victor Hugo, and a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie. He organized cultural dinners with Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and other writers at his luxurious villa in Medan near Paris after 1880. Zola played an essential role in the wrongly accused and convicted army officer named Alfred Dreyfus' exoneration, which highlighted his life and career. The Nobel Prize in Literature was introduced in the first and second years, and Zola was a highlight of that time.