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 12th in the series first published in the original French in 1884, is the least typical of the Rougon-Macquart books as it is not set in Paris, nor in Zola's fictional Plassans, the town where the family originates, and the heroine Pauline has only a tenuous connection to the family. Vizetelly's original English translation first appeared in 1888 under the title How Jolly Life Is! and it is reprinted here from the reissue of 1901 retitled The Joy of Life. Subsequent English translations have been entitled Zest for Life and The Bright Side of Life.