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Don Quixote
10Miguel de Cervantes
The first modern novel, the first novel about a novel, and the first comic masterpiece — Cervantes invented prose fiction's self-awareness in 1605 and no one has surpassed him since.
GBM Assessment (Score: 10/10)
Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote is considered the first modern novel and the greatest work of Spanish literature. Through the tragicomic adventures of the self-deluded knight-errant and his faithful squire Sancho Panza, Cervantes created an abiding exploration of the tension between idealism and reality that has influenced every subsequent novelist.
Brought out during Spain's decline as a world power, Don Quixote established the novel as a literary form capable of encompassing the full range of human experience. Its influence extends through Henry Fielding, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gustave Flaubert, and Jorge Luis Borges. It has consistently been ranked as the number one novel in international literary polls, is the most translated work of fiction after the Bible, and inspired the celebrated musical Man of La Mancha.
Shakespeare & Cervantes, c. 1605-1623
Shakespeare and Cervantes die the same year (1616). Don Quixote — the first modern novel — appears while Shakespeare produces his greatest plays. The King James Bible (1611), commissioned by James I and translated by 47 scholars, gives English-speaking Protestantism its defining sacred text and profoundly shapes English prose for centuries. England's break from Rome under Henry VIII (1534) and the defeat of Spain's Armada (1588) have established England as a rising Protestant naval power; the KJV consolidates this identity. Jamestown is founded (1607). Galileo turns his telescope skyward. Bacon's Novum Organum lays foundations of empirical science.
Awards & Adaptations
#1 novel in world polls. Most translated after Bible. Man of La Mancha.
Recommended Edition
T. Shelton (1612-20); J. Ormsby (1885); S. Putnam (1949)
