Description
Book Synopsis Paul Alexis was a novelist, journalist, and dramatist, one of the naturalistes, and a friend of Emile Zola. This volume brings together for the first time the 229 letters still in existence from him to Zola. Written over a period of thirty years, from the beginning of Rougon-Macquart to the Dreyfus affair, they are a rich source of information on a particularly fertile period in French literature. The letters are intimate, lacking all pretensions to elegance and stylistic constraints; taken together they describe vividly the private life and thoughts of this fervent naturaliste.
Alexis was the first to write a biography of Emile Zola, and his letters will be of interest to literary historians and critics for the fresh light they shed on Zola and on the history of naturalisme. Throughout the correspondence Alexis writes of his activities as a free-lance journalist, and provides a first-hand account of the press in France during the nineteenth
