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Emile Zola was a French journalist turned novelist and a proponent of the school of naturalism, which maintained that literature should be scientific. Using social history and medicine, Zola wrote a vast panoply of works in which social milieus are observed in minute detail. His series of twenty novels, "Les Rougon-Macquart" (1871-1893), is the narrative of a decaying family, suffering from alcoholism and illness. |