Émile Zola

Zola grew up poor in Aix-en-Provence after his engineer father died young, and worked as a shipping clerk at the publisher Hachette before turning his experimental theory of the novel, heredity and environment as a laboratory of fate, into the twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle, tracing one family's blood through the vices of the Second Empire. Germinal (1885), its account of a coal miners' strike, remains its fiercest volume.

In 1898 he risked the whole career on 'J'accuse…!', an open letter accusing the army of framing Captain Dreyfus on forged evidence. Convicted of libel, he fled to England for a year rather than go to prison, and returned only after the government wavered. He died in 1902, asphyxiated by a blocked chimney flue: an accident some still suspect was engineered by his enemies.