Cervantes' tale of the delusional knight-errant and his squire Sancho Panza hit Madrid's bookstalls on January 16, 1605, and sold out almost instantly. Its blend of satire, romance, and psychological depth broke from the chivalric romances it mocked, and it became one of the best-selling books in history. Cervantes, then 57 and largely broke, had no idea he'd written a cornerstone of Western literature.
Miguel de Cervantes was no literary golden child. He'd lost the use of his left hand at the Battle of Lepanto, spent five years enslaved in Algiers after being captured by Barbary pirates, and bounced between debtors' prisons and minor bureaucratic jobs in Spain. He wrote much of Don Quixote while broke and largely ignored by the literary establishment of his day.
When the book appeared in Madrid on January 16, 1605, it was an immediate sensation, pirated almost as fast as it sold, with unauthorized editions popping up in Portugal and Spanish America within months. Readers loved the tragicomic figure of Alonso Quixano, an aging gentleman so besotted with tales of knighthood that he renames himself Don Quixote, dons rusty armor, and rides out to revive chivalry, tilting at windmills he mistakes for giants.
The novel's self-aware narrative tricks, its shifting tone between farce and melancholy, and its deep humanity influenced everyone from Fielding to Flaubert to Faulkner. Cervantes wrote a sequel a decade later partly to spite a rival who published a fake continuation, cementing the book as one of literature's first true franchises.
Key people: Miguel de Cervantes