Famous for chronicling life in nineteenth-century France, and infamous for his political activism and frank depictions of sexuality, Émile Zola was one of the most ambitious and influential writers of his generation. Today, he is widely known for the Rougon-Macquart Cycle, a series of novels that attempt to apply scientific and analytic principles to everyday life. Such ideas—particularly the empirical, cause-and-effect observation of society—are at the heart of the style of literature that Zola pioneered, known during both his time and ours as “naturalism.”
Zola’s early years were marked by misfortune: his father, an Italian engineer named Francesco, died of pneumonia in 1847, and his...
