Spanish · 1547–1616
Miguel de Cervantes lived a picaresque life worthy of his fiction. A soldier in the Spanish navy, he fought at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, where gunfire permanently maimed his left hand. Captured by Barbary pirates, he spent five years as a slave in Algiers before being ransomed. He worked as a tax collector in Andalusia—a job that landed him in prison for accounting discrepancies. There, according to tradition, he began Don Quixote. The first part appeared in 1605 when Cervantes was fifty-seven, an immediate success across Europe. Part Two followed in 1615, responding to a spurious sequel by another author. Cervantes created the modern novel: a long prose fiction that examines the boundary between imagination and reality, mixing literary modes while maintaining psychological depth. His mad knight and practical squire became literature most famous pair. Cervantes died in Madrid on the same date as Shakespeare, April 23, 1616.