Emile Zola is one of the most important nineteenth-century French novelists, along with Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert. Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893; translated as The Rougon-Macquarts, 1896-1900), the series of twenty novels that Zola published between 1870 and 1893, is a major monument of French fiction, and several of the individual works in it, above all L'Assommoir (1877; translated as Gervaise (L'Assommoir): The Natural and Social Life of a Family under the Second Empire, 1879), Nana (1880; translated as Nana: Sequel to L'Assommoir, 1880), Germinal (1885; translated, 1885), and La Terre (1887; translated as The Soil: A Realistic Novel, 1888), are generally regarded as masterpieces of world literature. Zola also wrote short stories, plays, and opera librettos and had already established himself by the age of thirty as one of France's leading literary, drama, and art critics and social and political journalists.

As an art critic, he was among the first to recognize the...