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Emile Zola

Emile Zola (1840–1902) grew up in Aix-en-Provence, failed his baccalaureat, and then mapped a France under pressure in the twenty novels of the Rougon-Macquart. L'Assommoir is drink and a Paris street; Germinal is the mine, the strike, the dark that works. He stood up for Dreyfus in J'Accuse...! and paid in exile. Naturalism was the method: heredity, milieu, a crowd that behaves like weather. The accusation is documentary. The engine is still story.

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