Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, in 1547. His father was an itinerant barber-surgeon of modest means, and Cervantes's early life was peripatetic and often desperate. He studied in Madrid, went to Rome in the service of a cardinal, and then enlisted in the Spanish army. At the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 — the great naval engagement between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League — he received three gunshot wounds, two to the chest and one that permanently disabled his left hand. He fought with that hand in a sling. On the voyage home from military service in 1575, his ship was captured by Ottoman corsairs, and he was taken as a slave to Algiers. He spent five years there, attempting escape four times, until his family raised sufficient ransom. He returned to Spain in 1580 at thirty-three, with his left hand useless, his back pay from military service unpaid, and no clear prospects.

He spent the next twenty years in relative failure — writing plays that were not produced, working as a commissary agent for the Spanish Armada (requisitioning grain, which made him enemies and eventually landed him in prison when his accounts were found irregular), and attempting to get a government posting in the Americas, which was denied. Don Quixote, Part I, was published in 1605, when Cervantes was fifty-seven. It was an immediate commercial success and was translated into English within a year.

The novel's premise is deceptively simple: Alonso Quijano, a minor Spanish nobleman, has read so many chivalric romances that he has lost his grip on reality and believes himself to be a knight errant. He dubs himself Don Quixote de la Mancha, recruits a neighboring peasant, Sancho Panza, as his squire, and sets out across La Mancha on a series of misadventures — attacking windmills he mistakes for giants, insulting innkeepers he takes for lords. Part I is largely comic in the slapstick sense; Don Quixote is consistently humiliated. Part II (1615), published ten years later, is a different and more complex work. Don Quixote has become famous within the novel's world — characters have read Part I and know who he is — which allows Cervantes to investigate how a real person is transformed by his fictional representation, how identity is constructed through the stories others tell about us. The meta-fictional dimension of Part II was not widely theorized until the twentieth century but is now recognized as one of the most sophisticated moves in the history of the novel.

Don Quixote is widely considered the first modern novel, though the claim requires qualification: it is the first extended prose fiction in Western literature that is self-conscious about what it is doing, that treats its own fictionality as a subject, that uses an unreliable narrator, and that gives sustained psychological interiority to characters outside the nobility. Its influence is untraceable because it is total — every major novelist in the Western tradition has read it, and it is present in Fielding, in Flaubert, in Dostoyevsky, in Kafka, in Borges.

Cervantes died in Madrid in April 1616, the same week as Shakespeare — the coincidence has fascinated writers ever since, though the calendar dates don't quite match due to the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars. He died in poverty, acknowledged as a significant writer but never wealthy from his writing. The complete irony of his career is that the man who invented the most influential literary form in Western history spent most of his life failing at nearly everything else.