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Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (September 29, 1547 – April 22, 1616) was a Spanish novelist, poet and playwright, best known for his beloved Don Quixote, widely considered to be the first modern novel, the greatest novel in the Spanish language, and one of the most influential and enduring works in Western literature.

Before Cervantes, there was little European literature which could readily be identified within the genre of the novel. Medieval literature had notable examples of chivalric romance and allegory, and Cervantes' great predecessors Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio each wrote colorful, realistic tales of contemporary life that employed subtle literary techniques. Cervantes' Don Quixote, in contrast, was a revolutionary accomplishment, a sustained fictional narrative of more than one thousand pages that demonstrates a command of novelistic art that is little short of miraculous.

Cervantes infuses the story of the befuddled Don Quixote and his imagined chivalric adventures with a combination of pathos, riotous comedy, fast-paced action, and scrupulously realistic character portrayal—primarily the archetypal Don Quixote and his faithful, credulous companion, Sancho Panza. In the context of twentieth-century fiction, Cervantes employs astonishing post-modern devices, blurring the narrative voice and obscuring the line between fiction and commentary. Above all, Cervantes informs the novel with wisdom, insight into human psychology, and profound sympathy for humanity, despite its foibles.

With his younger contemporary William Shakespeare, who read Don Quixote and adapted the story for his lost play Cardenio, Cervantes is considered one the founders of early modern literature, concerned with the thoughts and mores of not just great men, but the common man as well. As with Shakespeare's plays for the London stage, Cervantes' work was accessible to the common Spaniard, while appealing to the most discriminating literary tastes. Cervantes' satire of popular chivalric literature—which so intoxicated Don Quixote as to convince him that he was a medieval knight errant—launched a four-century tradition of comic satiric novels beginning with Henry Fielding (who credited Cervantes as the inspiration behind his picaresque novels Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews), and influencing later comic writers such as William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Joseph Heller, among many others. Directly or indirectly, all later novelists are indebted to the genius of Cervantes.

Biography

Cervantes was born at Alcalá de Henares, Spain, north of Madrid. The exact date is not known, but it has been surmised that since he was named Miguel he might have been born on the feast day of Saint Michael (September 29) in 1547. He was the second son and fourth of seven children of Rodrigo de Cervantes and Leonor de Cortinas. His father was an impoverished apothecary-surgeon and came from an old family of Northern Spain.

Cervantes was baptized on November 9, 1558. Although Cervantes' reputation rests almost entirely on his portrait of the gaunt country gentleman, El ingenioso hidalgo, his literary production was considerable. As a child, Cervantes saw the famous actor-manager and dramatist Lope de Rueda and mentions this in the preface to his plays. This possibly ignited his passion for the theater in later life.

Cervantes lived an unsettled life of hardship and adventure. He was the son of a surgeon who presented himself as a nobleman, although Cervantes's mother seems to have been a descendant of Jewish converts to Christianity. Little is known of his early years, but it seems that Cervantes spent much of his childhood moving from town to town, while his father sought work. After studying in Madrid from 1568 to 1569, where his teacher was the humanist Juan López de Hoyos, Cervantes went to Rome in the service of Giulio Acquavita. Once in Italy, he began to familiarize himself with Italian literature, which figures prominently in his own works. In 1570 he became a soldier, and fought bravely on board a vessel in the great Battle of Lepanto in 1571. He was shot through the left hand and he never had the entire use of it again.

He had recovered sufficiently however to participate in the naval engagement against the Muslims of Navarino on October 7, 1572. He participated in the capture of Tunis on October 10, 1573, and the unsuccessful expedition to the relief of La Goletta in the autumn of 1574.

After living a while longer in Italy, with periods of garrison duty at Palermo and Naples, he finally determined to return home in 1575. The ship was captured by the Turks, and he and his brother, Rodrigo, were taken to Algiers on the Barbary Coast as slaves. In a stroke of good fortune, Cervantes was in possession of a letter of recommendation from the Duke of Alba, on whose ship he served. The letter was found on his person and the Turks took him for a man of some importance who might bring a hefty ransom, sparing him from execution. He was held captive for five years, undergoing great suffering, since his family could not afford the overpriced sum. Some of these experiences seem to have filtered into the episode of the "Captive" in Don Quixote, and in scenes of the play, El trato de Argel. After four unsuccessful escape attempts, he was ransomed by the trinitarians, and returned to his family in Madrid in 1580.

In 1584, he married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, 22 years his junior. He and Catalina had no children, although two years before his marriage Cervantes had fathered an illegitimate daughter, Isabel, in an affair with Ana Francisca de Rojas.

During the next 20 years he led a nomadic existence, working as a purchasing agent for the Spanish Armada, and as a tax collector. He was temporarily excommunicated from the church for confiscating supplies which belonged to the dean of the cathedral of Seville. He suffered a bankruptcy, and was imprisoned at least twice in 1597 and again in 1602 because of irregularities in his accounts, although once it appears to have been due to misappropriation by a subordinate. Between the years 1596 and 1600, he lived primarily in Seville. In 1606, Cervantes settled permanently in Madrid, where he remained for the rest of his life.

In 1585, Cervantes published his first major work, La Galatea, a pastoral romance, at the same time that some of his plays, now lost except for El trato de Argel which is about the lives of Christian slaves in Algiers and El cerco de Numancia, were playing on the stages of Madrid. La Galatea received little contemporary notice, and Cervantes never wrote the promised second part. Cervantes next turned his attention to drama, hoping to derive an income from that genre, but the plays which he composed—while clever—were widely unpopular. Aside from his plays, his most ambitious work in verse was Viaje del Parnaso (1614), an allegory which consisted largely of a rather tedious though good-natured review of contemporary poets. Cervantes himself realized that he was deficient in poetic gifts.

According to it prologue, the idea for Don Quixote occurred to him in prison at Argamasilla, in La Mancha. Cervantes' purpose was to give a picture of real life and manners, while expressing himself in clear, everyday language. This intrusion of common speech into a literary context was acclaimed by the reading public, but the author remained poor until 1605, when the first part of Don Quixote appeared.

Although it did not make Cervantes rich, Don Quixote brought him international fame as a man of letters. Cervantes also wrote some plays during this period, as well as several short novels. The vogue that Cervantes' story achieved led to the publication of a second part by an unknown writer, masquerading under the name of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. To protect his interests, Cervantes produced his own second part, which made its appearance in 1615. Surer of himself, this part does not feature extraneous plots, and is generally considered to be of higher literary merit than the first part.

In 1613, he published a collection of tales, the Exemplary Novels, some of which had been written earlier. On the whole, the Exemplary Novels bear the same stamp of genius as Don Quixote. The picaroon strain, already made familiar in Spain by the Lazarillo de Tormes and his successors, appears in one or another of them, especially in the Rinconete y Cortadillo, which is the best of all. He also published the Viaje Del Parnaso in 1614, and in 1615, the Eight Comedies and Eight New Interludes, the largest group of plays written by Cervantes to have survived. At the same time, Cervantes continued working on Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, a Byzantine novel of adventurous travel completed just before his death, and which appeared posthumously in January 1617.

Cervantes reportedly died in Madrid on April 23, 1616, (Gregorian calendar), the same date of the death as William Shakespeare (in the Julian calendar), although the Encyclopedia Hispanica claims the date on his tombstone would have been his date of burial, in accordance with the traditions of Spain at that time. If this is true, according to Hispanica, then it means that Cervantes probably died on April 22 and was buried on April 23.
- Cervantes

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