Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (September 29, 1547 – April 22, 1616) was a Spanish novelist, poet and playwright, best known for his beloved Don Quixote, widely considered to be the first modern novel, the greatest novel in the Spanish language, and one of the most influential and enduring works in Western literature.

Before Cervantes, there was little European literature which could readily be identified within the genre of the novel. Medieval literature had notable examples of chivalric romance and allegory, and Cervantes' great predecessors Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio each wrote colorful, realistic tales of contemporary life that employed subtle literary techniques. Cervantes' Don Quixote, in contrast, was a revolutionary accomplishment, a sustained fictional narrative of more than one thousand pages that demonstrates a command of novelistic art that is little short of miraculous.

Cervantes infuses the story of the befuddled Don Quixote and his imagined chivalric adventures with a combination of pathos, riotous comedy, fast-paced action, and scrupulously realistic character portrayal—primarily the archetypal Don Quixote and his faithful, credulous companion, Sancho Panza. In the context of twentieth-century fiction, Cervantes employs astonishing post-modern devices, blurring the narrative voice and obscuring the line between fiction and commentary. Above all, Cervantes informs the novel with wisdom, insight into human psychology, and profound sympathy for humanity, despite its foibles.

With his younger contemporary William Shakespeare, who read Don Quixote and adapted the story for his lost play Cardenio, Cervantes is considered one the founders of early modern literature, concerned with the thoughts and mores of not just great men, but the common man as well. As with Shakespeare's plays for the London stage, Cervantes' work was accessible to the common Spaniard, while appealing to the most discriminating literary tastes. Cervantes' satire of popular chivalric literature—which so intoxicated Don Quixote as to convince him that he was a medieval knight errant—launched a four-century tradition of comic satiric novels beginning with Henry Fielding (who credited Cervantes as the inspiration behind his picaresque novels Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews), and influencing later comic writers such as William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Joseph Heller, among many others. Directly or indirectly, all later novelists are indebted to the genius of Cervantes.