Word: zolas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...France they were portrayed as "peace partisans," condemned because they opposed Washington plans to war on Russia. In Italy they were "Gli Innocenti" (The Innocents), whose two young children (5 and 9) would be made orphans, and Rome's Communist L'Unitá compared them to Dreyfus, Zola, Sacco and Vanzetti, and John Brown...
...Zola was sent to school in Paris. He hid his provincial manners with an abrasive gruffness, but he could scarcely hide his provincial ignorance. In his final exam he declared that Charlemagne died in the 16th century, was forthwith flunked for being off by some 700 years. Apparently unconcerned, he plunged into a Bohemian life, took a tart for a mistress, and during one starved winter dressed in blankets because he had pawned even his last pair of pants to keep her. He wrote a trilogy of epic poems, notably bad and terribly long. His family, through a friend...
...clerk at the publisher Hachette's, started Zola off on the main track of his career. He ran a literary gossip column for a scandal sheet, hacked out newspaper serials, and even managed to publish a couple of poor books...
...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...
...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...