Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist, playwright and journalist, and the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism. He was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902. More than half of Zola's novels were part of a set of 20 known collectively as Les Rougon-Macquart, examining two branches of a family - the respectable Rougons and the disreputable Macquarts - over five generations. This novel, the 13th in the series first published in the original French in 1885, is an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s. Reprinted from the English translation of 1894.