Books: Popular Pessimist

EMILE ZOLA (148 pp.]—Angus Wilson —Morrow ($3).

"I do not expect justice," said Emile Zola in 1897, at the height of his fame. "I know that I must disappear." So far as his literary popularity was concerned, the forecast was sound. After his death in 1902, his readers began dropping away. Between 1932 and 1952 not a single book about Zola was published in English. In the U.S., thanks to Actor Paul Muni's performance in a movie version of his life, Zola is stereotyped as an angry old Frenchman in a plug hat.

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