Unexpected adventure in American literature
Ernest Hemingway is reported to have said that American literature begins with "Huckleberry Finn." I think American literature begins with this novel by Emile Zola. Frank Norris read this novel (and "La Bete Humaine" among others) while an art student in Paris, abandoned his ambitions to be an artist, returned to his home in California and wrote "McTeague," a direct knockoff of Zola's work.
Norris also edited to help pay the rent, and, as an editor, pushed the career of Theodore Dreiser. All three writers are novelists of lives less than exalted. From that idea has sprung virtually every great American writer in the last 150 years.
Both this novel -- and its companion, "Nana" --demand attention from anyone interested in the global texture of American literature.
