Anyone who reads Don Quixote for the first time inevitably has some preconceptions about it, beginning with the dictionary def

... MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA was born in Alcalá de Henares in Spain near Madrid in 1547. Nothing is certainly known about his education, but by the age of twenty-three, he enrolled in the army as a private soldier. He was maimed for life in the battle of Lepanto and was taken captive by the Moors on his way home in 1575. After five years of slavery, he was ransomed; and two or three years later, he returned to Spain. He settled in Madrid and began a moderately successful literary career, in which he wrote poetry, published a pastoral romance, La Galatea(1585), and had some twenty to thirty plays performed without, as he puts it, "offerings of cucumbers or other throwable matter." Failing to attain financial success, he obtained an employment in the Government office as a commissioner of food supplies for the Armada expedition. He later became a tax collector,

want to read more? →