Author · 1 summary
Spanish novelist and playwright
Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, the son of a poor barber-surgeon. Little is known about his schooling. In his early twenties he went to Italy and enlisted as a soldier in the Spanish navy. At the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 he was shot in the chest and lost the use of his left hand.
On the way home in 1575, pirates captured his ship. He spent five years as a slave in Algiers and tried to escape four times before a religious order paid his ransom. Back in Spain he worked as a supplier for the navy and as a tax collector, and he went to prison more than once over problems with his accounts.
He published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605, when he was 57. It follows a minor nobleman who reads so many tales of knights that he sets out to become one, with a farmer named Sancho Panza as his squire. The book mocks those tales and asks how much of a life can rest on illusion. A second part followed in 1615. He died in Madrid the next year.
Don Quixote is Miguel de Cervantes's comic novel about a Spanish gentleman who reads so many tales of chivalry that he becomes a knight errant, with the farmer Sancho Panza as his squire. For readers who want the plot of both parts and the ideas behind it.
New books, occasionally
