Nana

The Book: Nana, brought up in the slums of Paris has a brief career as an untalented actress before tasting success as a courtesan. In spite of being vulgar and ignorant, her sexuality appeals to many rich and powerful men whose fortunes she heartily plunders leading many of them to ruin and even suicide. Nana is one of a sequence of twenty novels that constitute Zola’s Rougon-Macquart Cycle. It was first written in French (1880) and later translated into English (1884). The Author: Emile Zola (1840-1902) Born in 1840 to a French mother and an Italian father, Zola earned fame and wealth as a novelist and critic after attempting work in an excise office and a publishing house and later as a journalist. His works were humorous and sensual at the same time and brought him fame coupled with notoreity. Zola established himself as the champion of the working classes and was the founder of the naturalist movement in literature. He died under mysterious circumstances, overcome by carbon mono oxide fumes in his sleep in 1902.