Emile Zola

Howells's essay on Zola, written just after his death. It is an argument with the term naturalism and with Zola's own account of himself: Howells contends that the man who claimed to be a scientist collecting documents was in fact a romantic of the school of Hugo, that the theory of the experimental novel was a misdescription of what he actually did, and that the enormous Rougon-Macquart series is moral work written by a moralist who insisted he was nothing of the kind. Howells also takes up the Dreyfus affair, and treats "J'accuse" as the act that settles the question of what Zola was.

William Dean Howells published the essay in the North American Review in 1902. As a novelist and critic he had spent twenty years arguing for realism in American fiction, and Zola was both his strongest example and his most awkward one.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.