Author

Books by Émile Zola

Émile Zola (1840–1902) was a French novelist, journalist, and political activist, and the leading figure of the Naturalist movement in literature. He wrote the twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart series over more than two decades, tracing the effects of heredity and environment through two branches of a single family across Second Empire and Third Republic France. Germinal (1885) is widely considered his masterwork. His 1898 open letter J'Accuse, defending Alfred Dreyfus against a fabricated treason charge, is one of the most famous acts of political journalism in history. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1902 in circumstances that have never been fully explained.