A short life of the author
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) was born in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, probably on 29 September 1547 (the feast of St Michael — his baptismal date is recorded as 9 October). His father was a barber-surgeon of modest means who moved the family constantly in search of work. Little is known of Cervantes’s education, but he was clearly well read; by his twenties he was writing poetry.
Life and Career
Cervantes’s life was an extraordinary sequence of adventures, failures, and misfortunes that reads like one of his own novels. In 1569 he left Spain for Italy, possibly fleeing an arrest warrant. He enlisted as a soldier and fought at the Battle of Lepanto (1571), the great naval engagement in which the Holy League defeated the Ottoman fleet. He was wounded three times, including a shot that permanently maimed his left hand — he was afterwards known as “el manco de Lepanto” (the one-handed man of Lepanto).
In 1575, sailing from Naples to Spain, Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates and held as a slave in Algiers for five years. He attempted escape four times; each time he was caught and, remarkably, not executed. He was finally ransomed by Trinitarian friars in 1580 and returned to Spain.
The years that followed were difficult. His first novel, La Galatea (1585), a pastoral romance, was a modest success. He married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios in 1584, worked as a tax collector and provisions commissioner for the Spanish Armada, and was imprisoned at least twice for financial irregularities — it is a persistent tradition, though unproven, that he began writing Don Quixote in prison in Seville.
El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (Part One) was published by Juan de la Cuesta in Madrid in January 1605. It was an immediate and immense success — six editions appeared in 1605 alone, and the book was quickly translated throughout Europe. The sequel, Segunda parte del Ingenioso Caballero Don Quixote de la Mancha, appeared in 1615, partly in response to an unauthorized “sequel” by the pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda (1614), which infuriated Cervantes and which he attacked within the text of his own second part.
Cervantes published prolifically in his last decade: Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels, 1613), a collection of twelve novellas; Viaje del Parnaso (Journey to Parnassus, 1614), a verse satire; and Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, published posthumously in 1617), a Byzantine romance. He died in Madrid on 22 April 1616 — within days of Shakespeare’s death, though the calendar difference means they did not die on the same day.
Major Works and Themes
Don Quixote is the first modern novel and one of the greatest works of world literature. In Part One, Alonso Quixano, an impoverished hidalgo from La Mancha who has gone mad from reading too many chivalric romances, renames himself Don Quixote, acquires a squire (the earthy, pragmatic Sancho Panza), and sets out on a series of adventures in which he mistakes windmills for giants, inns for castles, and peasant girls for princesses.
In Part Two, the tone deepens. Don Quixote and Sancho are now famous — characters within the novel have read Part One — and the comedy becomes more tender and more philosophical. The relationship between illusion and reality, fiction and truth, madness and wisdom is explored with a sophistication that anticipates the metafictional experiments of Borges and Nabokov.
The novel’s influence on Western literature is beyond calculation. The picaresque tradition, the realist novel, the comic novel, and the metafictional novel all descend from it. Faulkner kept a copy on his nightstand; Dostoevsky called it “the saddest book ever written.”
Critical Reception and Legacy
Don Quixote was a popular success from the moment of its publication and has remained continuously in print for over four centuries. The Romantic era elevated it from comic entertainment to tragic masterpiece — the interpretation of Don Quixote as a noble idealist destroyed by a prosaic world became central to European literature. It is now universally regarded as one of the foundational works of Western fiction.
Key Works
- La Galatea (1585)
- Don Quixote, Part One (1605)
- Novelas ejemplares (1613)
- Don Quixote, Part Two (1615)
- Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617, posthumous)
Collecting Cervantes
Cervantes is one of the rarest and most important of all collecting authors. First editions of Don Quixote are among the most valuable printed books in existence.
El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, Juan de la Cuesta, Madrid) — the first edition of Part One — is a legendary rarity. The first printing is distinguished from the six subsequent 1605 editions by bibliographic points that have been studied exhaustively. Complete copies are almost all in institutional hands; when a copy surfaces at auction (which happens perhaps once a decade), prices exceed $1,000,000. The second Cuesta edition (also 1605) and the 1605 Lisbon and Valencia editions are also of enormous value.
Segunda parte (1615, Juan de la Cuesta, Madrid) is somewhat less rare than Part One but still a major rarity. Copies bring $100,000–$500,000.
Novelas ejemplares (1613, Juan de la Cuesta) first editions are scarce and bring $50,000–$200,000.
Later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions of Don Quixote — particularly illustrated editions — are a major collecting area in their own right. The Joaquín Ibarra edition (Madrid, 1780), published by the Real Academia Española with engravings, is one of the most beautiful books of the eighteenth century.
Cervantes manuscripts are virtually nonexistent — no autograph literary manuscript is known to survive. Documents bearing his signature (legal papers, tax records) surface extremely rarely and are of immense value.