ZOLA, Émile. Les romanciers naturalistes.
Paris, Charpentier, 1881.

In-8 (187 x 121 mm), (3) ff., II-387 pp., (1) f.
Paperback, modern folder and slipcase.

First edition on publisher's paper, after 10 on Chine and 10 on Hollande.
Extremely rare autograph letter from the author ‘to Guy de Maupassant / his friend / Emile Zola’.

It was in 1872, after publishing ‘Le lendemain de la crise’ (The day after the crisis) in Le Corsaire and causing a political scandal, that Émile Zola, in a difficult moral and financial situation, met Ivan Tourgueniev (1818-1883). Tourgueniev offered him a job writing for the famous Russian magazine Les Messagers de l'Europe.
He published some of his articles in Le Roman expérimental (1880) but soon decided to publish them in a single volume in the present work in order to "give a history of the naturalist novel [...]. Only today does it take on its true meaning, its exact value". (preface by Zola)
Published in 1881, Les Romanciers naturalistes is Émile Zola's major critical manifesto. In it, the author brought together texts devoted to the writers he considered to be the pillars - or heralds - of naturalism: Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Daudet...

Through these portraits and analyses, Zola maps out a new literature, one that is scientific, documentary and rooted in reality. He affirmed his desire to create a school, to gather around him writers who would make the novel an instrument of knowledge and social reform.
It was this work, then, that clarified the aesthetic issues of naturalism and established Zola as the leader of the eponymous school.
A protégé of Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) and revealed by Zola with the publication of Boule de Suif in Les soirées de Médan, Maupassant quickly became his most loyal, and then his most talented, comrade-in-arms. This led to a literary partnership, with Maupassant borrowing from Zola the clinical observation of alienation in his writings, just as he borrowed from Flaubert his hatred of human stupidity.

Consignments to Guy de Maupassant are extremely rare; in 2021, a copy of Nana (1880) dedicated by Zola to Maupassant sold for $32,500 at Christie's New York.
Fine restoration to the spine and scattered brown spots for this unique piece of nineteenth-century literary history.

Vicaire, VII, 354 ; Benhamou Noëlle. Maupassant dans le Journal des Goncourt. In: Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt n°10, 2003. Les cent ans du premier prix Goncourt. pp. 283-304.