Don Quixote

1605, 1615 (published, two volumes, respectively) ; Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Don Quixote, fully titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Published in two volumes, 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.

The story follows the adventures of a hidalgo (a lower Spanish noble) named Mr. Alonso Quixano who reads so many chivalric romances he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing with Don Quixote’s rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood. Don Quixote, in the first part of the book, does not see the world for what it is and prefers to imagine he is living out a knightly story.

Throughout the novel Cervantes uses such literary techniques as realism, meta-theater, and intertextuality. It had a major influence on the literary community, as evidenced by direct references in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (1844), Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), as well as the creation of the word “quixotic.” Arthur Schopenhauer cited Don Quixote as one of the four greatest novels ever written, along with Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Wilhelm Meister.