Word: macquart
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...took a hard look at his cheap-jackery, and resolved to do better. He calmly decided, as he said, to "swallow" his time and spit it out again in a series of 20 long novels about the Rougon-Macquart, in which all the main characters were the legitimate and illegitimate descendants of one oversexed farm wench. For his series he invented a new ism, based on close, pessimistic observation of mankind, and called it Naturalism. But Zola no more believed in Naturalism than he did in God, Wilson concludes. The important thing was this: "I, I alone will be Naturalism...
...amazing thing was that some of the novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle proved, unarguably, to be masterpieces: L'Assommoir, a tragedy of poverty, Germinal, a tale of striking workmen, and La Terre, a brutal epic of farm life. For 25 years, as his books peddled the "black poetry" of pessimism and garbled heredity under the name of hard fact, men of state and men of letters rose to protest-but not to much avail-that Zola was lying. Millions read Zola's books...
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