In 1908, six years after his death, Emile Zola’s remains were exhumed from their quiet resting place in Montmartre and transported to the Pantheon, where the author of J’accuse was to neighbor his early hero, Victor Hugo. It had seemed only right, at least after Zola’s Dreyfusard ally, Georges Clemenceau, had taken over the reins of the Republic, to cede to the great man the glory that was his due. Thus was foreshadowed Zola’s later fate, which he suffers to this day—that of the national literary hero, a figure of deadly boring respectability. No one can doubt the courage of his stand against xenophobic nationalism, nor fail to honor his contributions to literary realism. But, frankly, Zola could do with a lot less reverence and more honest recognition of the gifted guttersnipe he often was.

How can we breathe some life back into Zola? The reader could do no better than plunge into Frederick Brown’s excellent new biography, which gives us the richest and most well-rounded portrait of Zola to date. Professor Brown, a veteran observer of the French literary scene, has made good use of a recent edition of letters that fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge about different stages of Zola’s life. But more fundamentally, Brown has drawn a complete and elegant picture of the social and political milieus in which Zola was steeped.

Zola could do with a lot less reverence and more