Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes was a Spanish novelist of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, widely regarded as the author of the first modern novel, Don Quixote.

Miguel de Cervantes led a turbulent life — he served as a soldier, was wounded at the Battle of Lepanto, spent five years as a captive in Algiers, and worked as a tax collector before debt and frustration led him back to writing. The two volumes of Don Quixote, published in 1605 and 1615, emerged from those hard-won years. The novel follows a middle-aged country gentleman who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and sets out as a knight-errant, with the peasant Sancho Panza as his hapless squire.

Don Quixote is often called the first modern novel, and the label holds: Cervantes invented the unreliable narrator, the self-aware fictional protagonist, and the interplay between illusion and reality that would shape the European novel for centuries. The book is simultaneously a parody of chivalric romance and a deeply compassionate portrait of human idealism in the face of an indifferent world. The windmill scene is famous; less remembered is how melancholy the book grows in its second half.

Reading Don Quixote requires patience — it is long, digressive, and some interpolated tales slow the momentum — but the rewards are immense. Few works of literature ask such persistent and uncomfortable questions about the relationship between the stories we tell ourselves and the world as it actually is. It remains not just a historical monument but a living, funny, and strangely moving novel.