Émile Zola (Cyclopedia of World Authors)

Émile Zola (ZOH-luh) was probably the most important and controversial French novelist of the late nineteenth century. The son of an engineer of mixed Greek and Italian ancestry who died when his son was only seven, Zola was educated at Aix and returned to Paris in 1858 to start his career as a writer. He worked as a critic, then in 1867 also began to write novels. In 1871 he published The Rougon-Macquart Family, the first volume of twenty in a series called the “Rougon-Macquart Novels,” which deals with the history of a family under the Second Empire. The first of these...

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