Don Quixote: the Classic Adventure Novel by Miguel De Cervantes

Miguel De Cervantes

Nov 2017 · Classic Books Book 15 · Xist Publishing

About this eBook

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

One of the earliest novels ever written, Don Quixote tells the story of an imaginative nobleman, Alonso Quixano. Quixano reads so many romances that he begins to believe that he is a knight, fated to restore chivalry and justice to the world. Quixano changes his name to Don Quixote de la Mancha and recruits Sancho Panza, a simple farmer grounded in reality, as his squire. The two set out to live the knightly story he has so often imagined.
Don Quixote is a foundational work for the western canon, with direct references in classic works such as Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and many more famous novels.

About the author

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.