Emile Zola 
The Masterpiece (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) 

Emile Zolas
The Masterpiece (Loeuvre) is the story of a young artist, Claude Lantier, and his struggle against the indifference and hostility of an ossified art world. His aim is revolutionary, for he believes that his dream of representing ‘the whole of modern life’ will yield ‘a series of canvases big enough to burst the Louvre.’ Yet as an artist ahead of his time, he cannot prevail against the hidebound standards of the Academie des Beaux Arts-and, increasingly, against the limits of his own ability to paint the grand works that he envisions. Set in the bohemian milieu of nineteenth-century Paris,
The Masterpiece recreates the art world that Zola knew well, both as a journalist and as the boyhood friend of one if its premier artists, Paul Cézanne.

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Emile Zola, born in Paris in 1840, was raised in Aix en Provence in conditions of extreme poverty following the death of his father in 1847. In 1865, he decided to support himself by writing alone.
The Ladies’ Paradise is the eleventh novel in a series of twenty novels under the generic title
The Rougon-Macquarts: the Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire. In this series, published between 1871 and 1893, Zola scientifically documents the effects of heredity and environment on the Rougon-Marquart family.