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Nana is a novel by the French naturalist author Emile Zola. Completed in 1880, Nana is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series, which was to tell "The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire" (Becker 96).

A year before he started to write Nana, Zola didn't know anything yet about the Variétés. It was Ludovic Halévy who invited him to see an operetta with him on February 15, 1878, took him backstage, and told him innumerable stories about the amorous life of the star (Anna Judic whose ménage à trois would become the model for Rose Mignon, her husband, and Fauchery) and also about famous cocottes such as Blanche d'Antigny, Anna Deslions, Delphine de Lizy, and Hortense Schneider, an amalgam of which was to serve the writer as the basis for his principal character.

Nana tells the story of Anna Coupeau's rise from streetwalker to high-class cocotte during the last three years of the French Second Empire. Nana first appears in the end of L'Assommoir (1877), another of Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, in which she is portrayed as the daughter of an abusive drunk; in the end, she is living in the streets and just beginning a life of prostitution. (read more . . . )