Émile Zola

Émile Zola wrote "J'accuse" — an open letter to the president of France in defense of Dreyfus, convicted of an act of espionage he had never committed. For that letter Zola was found guilty of libel and fled to England.

He was born in Paris in 1840. His Italian father died early. Poverty, failure at the final examinations. He worked for a publisher, then as a critic; then came the novel.

The twenty-volume cycle "Les Rougon-Macquart": the history of one family across several generations of the Second Empire. "Nana," "Germinal," "The Belly of Paris," "L'Assommoir" — naturalism as social diagnosis.

He died in 1902 of carbon monoxide poisoning. An accident — or murder? There was never an investigation.