The Beast Within (1890) is a novel by French author Émile Zola. The seventeenth of twenty volumes of Zola’s monumental Les Rougon-Macquart series is an epic story of family, politics, class, and history that traces the disparate paths of several French citizens raised by the same mother. Spanning the entirety of the French Second Empire, Zola provides a sweeping portrait of change that refuses to shy away from controversy and truth as it gets to the heart of heredity and human nature. Jacques Lantier is a violent man. Kept in check by his dedication to his work as an engine driver, he manages to suppress the disturbing fantasies of rape and murder that fill his tortured mind. While waiting for his train to get repaired, he meets his cousin Flore, a beautiful young woman who inflames him with desire and deadly intent. At the last moment, he flees before he can harm her, only to witness a gruesome murder at night by the railroad tracks. When a police investigation fails to find the killer, life in Le Havre returns to a sense of calm, and even Lantier seems to put the past behind him. When he begins an affair with Severine, the wife of his boss Roubaud, he is roped into a plot to kill the man and steal a secret fortune. The Beast Within is a story of family and fate, a thrilling and detailed novel that continues a series rich enough for its author to explore in twenty total volumes. This edition of Émile Zola’s The Beast Within is a classic work of French literature reimagined for modern readers.
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Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist, journalist, and playwright. Born in Paris to a French mother and Italian father, Zola was raised in Aix-en-Provence. At 18, Zola moved back to Paris, where he befriended Paul Cézanne and began his writing career. During this early period, Zola worked as a clerk for a publisher while writing literary and art reviews as well as political journalism for local newspapers. Following the success of his novel Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola began a series of twenty novels known as Les Rougon-Macquart, a sprawling collection following the fates of a single family living under the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Zola’s work earned him a reputation as a leading figure in literary naturalism, a style noted for its rejection of Romanticism in favor of detachment, rationalism, and social commentary. Following the infamous Dreyfus affair of 1894, in which a French-Jewish artillery officer was falsely convicted of spying for the German Embassy, Zola wrote a scathing open letter to French President Félix Faure accusing the government and military of antisemitism and obstruction of justice. Having sacrificed his reputation as a writer and intellectual, Zola helped reverse public opinion on the affair, placing pressure on the government that led to Dreyfus’ full exoneration in 1906. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902, Zola is considered one of the most influential and talented writers in French history.
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