Don Quixote of the Mancha

Miguel De Cervantes

Jan. 2010 · Cosimo, Inc.

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Originally published between 1909 and 1917 under the name "Harvard Classics," this stupendous 51-volume set-a collection of the greatest writings from literature, philosophy, history, and mythology-was assembled by American academic CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT (1834-1926), Harvard University's longest-serving president. Also known as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf," it represented Eliot's belief that a basic liberal education could be gleaned by reading from an anthology of works that could fit on five feet of bookshelf.Volume XIV features the work recently named by the Nobel Institute as the greatest book of all time: Don Quixote of the Mancha, Part 1, by Spanish novelist MIGUEL DE CERVANTES (1547-1616). The picaresque adventures of a delusional would-be knight have, over the centuries, been taken as farce, satire, psychological drama, and social commentary, and have inspired writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky. Straddling the writings of the Renaissance and modern literature, it is considered the first modern novel.

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Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcala de Henares, Spain, in 1547. In 1585, a few months after his marriage to Catalina de Salazar, he published his first major work as an author, the pastoral novel La Galatea which was poorly received. Cervantes became a tax collector in Granada in 1594, but was imprisoned in 1597 due to money problems with the government. Folklore maintains that while in prison, he wrote his most famous novel, Don Quixote, which was an immediate success upon publication in 1605. After several years of writing short novels and plays, Cervantes was spurred to write the sequel to Don Quixote in 1615 when an unauthorized sequel appeared to great acclaim. Though Cervantes' sequel was rushed and flawed, Don Quixote remains a powerful symbol that has endured to present times in many forms. Cervantes died on April 22, 1616, at the age of 69.