The title story -- the tale of a living man mistaken for dead and burried in a coffin -- is wonderful stuff, like all of Zola. But it's not alone: also included in this collection are "Captain Burle," "The Miller's Daughter," and "The Flood." Zola is prehaps best-remembered for his role in the Dreyfus affair: his J'accuse charged the then-current French government of antisemitism. It had, he said, wrongfully placing the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus in jail. This accusatory tale didn't appear in a journal, but as an accusatory letter (addresed to then-President Felix Faure!) on the front page of a Paris daily, L'Aurore. Zola was brought to trial for criminal libel on 9 June 1899, and was convicted on 23 February, sentenced, and removed from the Legion of Honor. He declared that Dreyfus' conviction and removal to a prisoners island came after a false accusation of espionage and was a miscarriage of justice. Rather than go to jail, he fled to England. But soon he was allowed to return in time to see the government fall. More than half of Zola's novels were part of a set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart.

Author Biography

Emile Edouard Charles Antoine Zola (1840 - 1902) was a French novelist, playwright, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'accuse. Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.