The career of the Rougons. His Excellency Eugène Rougon. The harvest

Émile Zola is one of the pillars of world realistic literature, a leader and theorist of the naturalist literary movement, an enthusiastic researcher of the everyday, a passionate human rights advocate and publicist, who influenced all realistic literature of the 20th century and primarily the school of "new journalism": Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer. His most famous work is the monumental twenty-volume cycle "Les Rougon-Macquart," which unfolds before the reader an endless panorama of human vices and virtues against the backdrop of the Second Empire. It is an encyclopedia of life in Paris and the French provinces, based on several generations of one family that bore the strangest fruits — a dizzying epic in its detail and scale, encompassing everything: greed and selflessness, love for one’s neighbor and bestial passion, lofty aspirations and everyday routine, pride, cruelty, cynicism, and violence, the rise and fall of the strong and weak of this world. This illustrated edition contains the first three novels of the cycle in the order recommended by the author: here the sprawling family of Rougons-Macquart is born, yields and gathers a bountiful and corrupt harvest, claims power, and leads to despair and the destruction of its first victims, whose souls cannot resist decay.