Émile Zola

Émile Zola was a French novelist, journalist and playwright, and the best known practitioner of naturalism in fiction. He wrote with close attention to work, money and family, and he was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prizes in Literature, in 1901 and 1902. In 1898 his open letter J'accuse, printed in a Paris newspaper, defended the falsely convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus and became a landmark of the case. The Attack on the Mill is one of his shorter stories.