Three Wars

Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was born in Paris on 2nd April 1840. When he was 3 the family moved to Aix-en-Provence in the southeast. At 7 his father died, leaving the family on a meagre pension. In 1858, they returned to Paris. His mother had planned a law career for Émile, but he failed his baccalauréat examination twice. He took jobs as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department for the publisher Hachette. Zola also wrote political, literary and art reviews for newspapers. As a writer Zola wrote numerous short stories, essays, plays and novels. When ‘La Confession de Claude’ was published and received the attention of the police Hachette fired him. He continued to write and after his first major novel, ‘Thérèse Raquin’ (1867), Zola started the series called ‘Les Rougon-Macquart’, a carefully planned twenty-volume history of a single family under the reign of Napoléon III. With the publication of ‘L'Assommoir’, Zola became wealthy. His subsequent works, ‘Nana’