Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prizes in Literature in and His father was an Italian engineer with some Greek ancestry, [ 9 ] who was born in Venice in , and engineered the Zola Dam in Aix-en-Provence ; his mother was French. In , five-year-old Zola was sexually molested by an older boy.
He would later complain about poor nutrition and bullying in school. Zola started to write in the Romantic style. Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked for minimal pay as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department for the publisher Hachette. In Zola was naturalized as a French citizen.
The marriage remained childless. Alexandrine Zola had had a child before she met Zola that she had given up, because she had been unable to take care of it. When she confessed this to Zola after their marriage, they went looking for the girl, but she had died a short time after birth. In , he was given a camera, but he only began to use it in and attained a near professional level of expertise.
In November Alexandrine discovered the affair, which brought the marriage to the brink of divorce. After Zola's death, the children were given his name as their lawful surname. During his early years, Zola wrote numerous short stories and essays, four plays, and three novels. The series examines two branches of the familyβthe respectable that is, legitimate Rougons and the disreputable illegitimate Macquartsβover five generations.
In the preface to the first novel of the series, Zola states, "I want to explain how a family, a small group of regular people, behaves in society, while expanding through the birth of ten, twenty individuals, who seem at first glance profoundly dissimilar, but who are shown through analysis to be intimately linked to one another. Heredity has its own laws, just like gravity. I will attempt to find and to follow, by resolving the double question of temperaments and environments, the thread that leads mathematically from one man to another.
