Zola planned twenty novels like a physicist of blood
At twenty-eight, Émile Zola sketched Les Rougon-Macquart as a twenty-volume laboratory: one family, five generations, heredity and milieu under Napoleon III. Later J'Accuse…! (13 January 1898) risked exile to reopen the Dreyfus case—and still he wrote nearly every day for thirty years.
Born in Paris on 2 April 1840 to Italian engineer François Zola and Émilie Aubert, Émile moved to Aix-en-Provence at three; his father died in 1847. Back in Paris in 1858 with childhood friend Paul Cézanne, he failed the baccalauréat twice, clerked for a shipping firm and for Hachette, and reviewed art while despising Napoleon III. Naturalized French in 1862, he married seamstress Alexandrine Meley in 1870; after 1888 he fathered Denise and Jacques with Jeanne Rozerot, later given his surname.
Thérèse Raquin (1867) launched the Rougon-Macquart cycle, tracing legitimate Rougons and illegitimate Macquarts through Haussmann's Paris and industrial vice. L'Assommoir (1877) made him richer than Victor Hugo; Nana (1880) and La Débâcle (1892) sold still more. For roughly three decades he kept a daily writing habit, treating steady output as non-negotiable. Childhood friend Cézanne broke with him over the painter portrait in L'Œuvre (1886).
When Captain Alfred Dreyfus was shipped to Devil's Island on forged treason evidence, Zola published J'Accuse…! as an open letter to President Félix Faure in L'Aurore. Convicted of libel, stripped of the Legion of Honour, he fled to England in July 1898, returning after the Supreme Court annulled the verdict in June 1899. Nominated for the first Nobel Prizes in Literature (1901–02), he never entered the Académie française—yet Tom Wolfe later claimed Zola's documentary novel as a model for new journalism.
Source: Émile Zola
