Author of Don Quixote, father of the modern novel
The Spanish writer whose life was a string of hardships — soldier, his left hand crippled, five years a slave of pirates, jailed more than once. It was in prison that he conceived Don Quixote: a country gentleman driven mad by chivalric romances who takes himself for a knight-errant and charges a windmill. Beginning as a parody of chivalric literature, the novel wrote out the eternal mismatch of ideal and reality, and is widely held to be the first modern novel of the West. He is said to have died in the same year as Shakespeare.
Don Quixote takes the windmills in the field for giants, levels his lance, charges on horseback, and is flung to the ground by the sails — an image that became the symbol of the whole novel and a proverb still current today. With an absurd knight, Cervantes asked a serious question: a man devoted to an ideal the world does not share — is he ridiculous, or admirable?
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.