by Emile Zola (Author)
The novel's central character is tienne Lantier, previously seen in L'Assommoir (1877), a young migrant worker who arrives at the forbidding coalmining town of Montsou in the bleak far north of France to earn a living as a miner. Sacked from his previous job on the railways for assaulting a superior - he befriends the veteran miner Maheu, who finds him somewhere to stay and gets him a job pushing the carts down the pit. tienne is portrayed as a hard-working idealist but also a na ve youth;.
Author Biography
French novelist, playwright, and journalist Emile Zola (1840-1902) was a leading proponent of naturalism in fiction, as expressed in his monumental 20-novel series Les Rougon-Macquart. Nominated for the first and second Nobel Prizes in Literature, Zola also played a major role in the exoneration of the falsely accused officer at the center of the Dreyfus Affair; the headline of his open letter to the President of France, J'accuse...!, remains an international watchword for speaking truth to power.