emile Zola was born in Paris. His father was an Italian engineer, who had French the citizenship in 1862. Zola spent his childhood in Aix-en-Provence, southeast France. When he was seven, his father died, leaving the family with money problems - his mother was largely dependent on a tiny pension. In 1858 Zola moved with his mother to Paris. In his youth he became friends with the painter Paul Cézanne and started to write under the influence of the romantics.

Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in sales department of the publishing house of Louis-Christophe-Francois-Hachette. He also wrote literary columns and art critics for the Cartier de Villemessant's newspapers. As a political journalist Zola did not hide his antipathy toward the French Emperor Napoleon III, who used the Second Republic as a springboard to become Emperor.

During his formative years Zola wrote several short stories and essays, 4 plays and 3 novels. Among his early books was 'CONTES Á NINON', which was published in 1864. When his sordid autobiographical novel 'LA CONFESSION DE CLAUDE' (1865) was published and attracted the attention of the police, Zola was fired from Hachette.

After his first major novel, 'THÉRÈSE RAQUIN' (1867), Zola started the long series called 'Les Rougon Macquart', the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. At first the plan was limited to 10 books, but ultimately the series comprised 20 volumes, ranging in subject from the world of peasants and workers to the imperial court.'LA BÊTE HUMAINE' (1890, 'The Beast in Man') was adapted into screen first time in 1938. The director, Jean Renoir wrote the screenplay with Zola's daughter, Denise Leblond-Zola. In the film Séverine wants her lover, the locomotive engineer Lantier, to kill her stationmaster husband. Lentier, a honest and proud man, cannot do it, but in a fit anger and frustration he strangles her beloved instead and commits suicide by throwing himself off a fast moving train. The appearance of 'L'ASSOMMOIR' ('Drunkard', 1877), a depiction of alcoholism, made Zola the best-known writer in France. He bought an estate at Médan and attracted imitators and disciplines.

About 1870 zola became the apologist for and most significant exponent of French naturalism, a literary school that maintained that the novel should be scientific in a strict sense. Zola tried to adjust scientific principles in the process of observing society and interpreting it in fiction. His treatise, 'LE ROMAN EXPÉRIMENTAL' (1880), manifested the author's faith in science and acceptance of scientific determinism.

In 1885 Zola published one of his finest works, 'GERMINAL'. It was first major work on a strike, based on his research notes on labor conditions in the coal mines. The book was attacked by right-wing political groups as a call to revolution. 'NANA' (1880), another famous work of the author, took the reader to the world of sexual exploitation.

Zola had an ardent zeal for social reform. He was anti-Catholic and wrote many diatribes against the clergy and the Church. His part in the Dreyfus Affair (notably his article, 'J'accuse', 1898) was his most conspicuous public action, and he became the special object of the hatred of the anti-Dreyfus party.

Zola died on September 28, in 1902, under mysterious circumstances, overcame by carbon monoxide fumes in his sleep. According to some speculations, Zola's enemies blocked the chimney of his apartment, causing poisonous fumes to build up and kill him.