Émile Zola

His father was an Italian engineer with some Greek ancestry, who was born in Venice in 1795, and engineered the Zola Dam in Aix-en-Provence; his mother was French.

The family moved to Aix-en-Provence in the southeast when Émile was three years old.

Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (, also, ; 2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism.

Zola was born in Paris in 1840 to François Zola (originally Francesco Zolla) and Émilie Aubert.

In 1845, five-year-old Zola was sexually molested by an older boy.

Two years later, in 1847, his father died, leaving his mother on a meager pension.

In 1852, Zola entered the Collège Bourbon as a boarding student.

Those were hard years for young Zola: he would later complain about poor nutrition and bullying in school.

In 1858, the Zolas moved to Paris, where Émile's childhood friend Paul Cézanne soon joined him.

Zola started to write in the romantic style.

His widowed mother had planned a law career for Émile, but he failed his baccalauréat examination twice.

Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked for minimal pay as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department for the publisher Hachette.

He also wrote literary and art reviews for newspapers.

As a political journalist, Zola did not hide his dislike of Napoleon III, who had successfully run for the office of president under the constitution of the French Second Republic, only to use this position as a springboard for the coup d'état that made him emperor.

In 1862 Zola was naturalized as a French citizen.

Among his early books was Contes à Ninon, published in 1864.

In 1865, he met Éléonore-Alexandrine Meley, who called herself Gabrielle, a seamstress, who became his mistress.

With the publication of his sordid autobiographical novel La Confession de Claude (1865) attracting police attention, Hachette fired Zola.

His novel Les Mystères de Marseille appeared as a serial in 1867.

He was also an aggressive critic, his articles on literature and art appearing in Villemessant's journal L'Événement.

After his first major novel, Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola started the series called Les Rougon-Macquart.

In Paris, Zola maintained his friendship with Cézanne, who painted a portrait of him with another friend from Aix-en-Provence, writer Paul Alexis, entitled Paul Alexis Reading to Zola.

More than half of Zola's novels were part of the twenty-volume Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, which details the history of a single family under the reign of Napoléon III.

Unlike Balzac, who in the midst of his literary career resynthesized his work into La Comédie Humaine, Zola from the start, at the age of 28, had thought of the complete layout of the series.

Set in France's Second Empire, in the context of Baron Haussmann's changing Paris, the series traces the environmental and hereditary influences of violence, alcohol, and prostitution which became more prevalent during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution.

They married on 31 May 1870.

Together they cared for Zola's mother.

She stayed with him all his life and was instrumental in promoting his work.

The marriage remained childless.

Alexandrine Zola had a child before she met Zola that she had given up, because she was unable to take care of it.

When she confessed this to Zola after their marriage, they went looking for the girl, but she had died a short time after birth.

In 1888, he was given a camera, but he only began to use it in 1895 and attained a near professional level of expertise.

Also in 1888, Alexandrine hired Jeanne Rozerot, a 21-year-old seamstress who was to live with them in their home in Médan.

The 48-year-old Zola fell in love with Jeanne and fathered two children with her: Denise in 1889 and Jacques in 1891.

After Jeanne left Médan for Paris, Zola continued to support and visit her and their children.

In November 1891 Alexandrine discovered the affair, which brought the marriage to the brink of divorce.

The discord was partially healed, which allowed Zola to take an increasingly active role in the lives of the children.

After Zola's death, the children were given his name as their lawful surname.

During his early years, Zola wrote numerous short stories and essays, four plays, and three novels.

He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in his renowned newspaper opinion headlined J'Accuse…! Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.