Émile Zola

Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. According to major Zola scholar and biographer Henri Mitterand, "Naturalism contributes something more than realism: the attention brought to bear on the most lush and opulent aspects of people and the natural world. The realist writer reproduces the object's image impersonally, while the naturalist writer is an artist of temperament." He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse…! Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.