Émile Zola was one of the most important, though controversial, French novelists of the late nineteenth century. A founder of the realist literary movement. Zola began in 1871 to write his most notable series of novels, "Les Rougon-Macquart", in which he relates the history of a fictional family under the Second Empire in France. Unlike Honoré de Balzac, whose works examined a wider scope of French society, Zola focused on the evolution of one single family. The third novel in this series, "Le Ventre de Paris", which literally translates as "The Belly of Paris", was first published in French in 1873 and in English in 1888. It is the first novel in the series to represent the French working class in its entirety. It tells the tale of Florent, an escaped political prisoner who seeks refuge in Paris with his half-brother Quenu and his wife Lisa. The subject of great controversy in England when first published by Henry Vizetelly, who was convicted of obscene libel for having done so, the novel was subsequently released in an expurgated form by Vizetelly's son Edward. This edition presents the original unexpurgated edition first published in 1888 by Henry Vizetelly and includes a biographical afterword.
