The great novelist, usually considered the epitome of Gallic realism, was in fact born of an Italian father and only achieved French citizenship on his 21st birthday. His father, a civil engineer, died a bankrupt through business speculation band young Zola and his French mother had a hard struggle; when they moved from the South to Paris, he worked for a time as a Customs clerk, and later as a journalist. These early struggles no doubt helped to harden him and strengthen his ambition, so that he became one of the most industrious and professionally disciplined writers of his time; most of his novels were built on laborious research, and almost all of them are long and densely detailed. Zola built up an entire social panorama of French life in a very vital period and he was also a committed" intellectual, taking the anti-clerical, rationalist, humanitarian stance in a society which had deep and sometimes violent divisions. His famous intervention in the Dreyfus Affair was undoubtedly courageous and helped to bring matters to a head, though his flight to London to escape prosecution was possibly a tactical error. Zola kept two households and this placed massive strains on his marriage, which today would undoubtedly have ended in divorce.
His death in 1902, through asphyxiation from the fumes of a stove in his bedroom, was possibly murder - many years later, a stove-fitter allegedly confessed on his death-bed that he and his anti-Dreyfusard mates had blocked Zola's chimney and had removed the evidence next morning. Six years after his death, his remains were removed to the Pantheon, which was the lay equivalent of canonisation. At over 800 pages, this biography is rather like the novels - long, energetic, closely researched, and covering an entire chapter of French history, social and political.