Emile Zola's success as a writer may have come as a shock to his teachers at the Lycee St. Louis. Young Emile failed German and rhetoric and received a zero in one of his classes: French literature!

[Zola was in fine company: William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all failed courses in college. Marcel Proust's teacher considered his compositions disorganized. And Ellen Glasgow, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, found school "intolerable."]

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