Don Quixote

Don Quixote, the full title being The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes. Originally published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, the novel is considered a founding work of Western literature and is often said to be the first modern novel. The novel has been labelled by many well-known authors as the "best novel of all time" and the "best and most central work in world literature". Don Quixote is also one of the most-translated books in the world and one of the best-selling novels of all time. The plot revolves around the adventures of a member of the lowest nobility, a hidalgo from La Mancha named Alonso Quijano, who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant (caballero andante) to revive chivalry and serve his nation, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits as his squire a simple farm labourer, Sancho Panza, who brings an earthy wit to Don Quixote's lofty rhetoric. In the first part of the book, Don Quixote does not see the world for what it is and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story meant for the annals of all time. However, as Salvador de Madariaga pointed out in his Guía del lector del Quijote (1972 [1926]), referring to "the Sanchification of Don Quixote and the Quixotization of Sancho", as "Sancho's spirit ascends from reality to illusion, Don Quixote's declines from illusion to reality". The book had a major influence on the literary community, as evidenced by direct references in Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers (1844), and Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) as well as the word quixotic. Mark Twain referred to the book as having "swept the world's admiration for the mediaeval chivalry-silliness out of existence". It has been described by some as the greatest work ever written.