Celebrity Graveland

April 02, 1840 – September 29, 1902

French author, journalist and playwright, Émile Zola, is widely regarded as the preeminent writer in the Naturalism movement in literature. With more than 30 works to his credit, Zola was one of the most prominent writers of his time. A large percentage of his books centered around multiple generations of a single family living in Napoleon III’s France.

His naturalistic portrayals of common people and his negative depictions of real-life political figures led Zola to a life of activism in addition to his writing. He became an outspoken proponent of the liberalization of France and his vocal critiques gained him a lot of enemies in the public sphere.

He was tried for criminal libel and forced to flee to England for a time.

And he may or may not have been murdered.

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July 24, 1802 – December 05, 1870

French novelist and playwright, Alexandre Dumas, was a leading voice in the 19th Romantic literary movement. Born of a mixed-race lineage stemming from the Caribbean French colony known today as Haiti, Dumas used his struggles with race issues along with his travels throughout a changing European landscape to craft historical fiction that was both immediately popular and enduring. Though a successful playwright at the start of his career, his most famous works are arguably his many novels, including “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers.” Like many of his contemporaries, much of his writing was released serially and later compiled into the works we know today.

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February 26, 1802 – May 22, 1885

Most widely known as one of the greatest French writers of all time, Victor Hugo was so much more than a teller of stories. A true Renaissance Man, Hugo was a novelist, of course, but also a poet, a statesman, a dramatist, an activist, an artist…the list is lengthy. The son of a general in the Napoleonic army, Hugo moved around a lot in his youth. The stress of the constant moving led to his parents separating and he and his brother landing in a boarding school in Paris. He wrote from an early age. His first poem was submitted to a competition when he was 15. The words kept coming. In all he published more than 30 novels, 21 collections of poetry, 11 plays and countless essays as well as thousands of drawings.

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