In 1605, a 57-year-old Spanish ex-soldier named Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra published a short novel mocking the chivalric romances that had been the fashionable reading of his youth. The book was about a deluded country gentleman who has read so many of these books he loses his mind, dresses up in rusted armour, and rides out as a knight-errant in a Spain that has not had knights for two hundred years. The first edition was fifty-two chapters. Cervantes thought he was done.
The book was a hit. By the next year it had been reprinted in Lisbon, Madrid, Valencia, and Brussels. Pirate editions appeared across Europe before the term pirate edition existed. By 1612 it had been translated into English. It made Cervantes briefly famous and not noticeably less poor.
Then, in 1614, while he was working on a continuation, someone Cervantes could not identify published a fake Part Two under the pseudonym Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. The fake was crude, full of insults to Cervantes personally, and nine years late to the joke. Cervantes was furious. He finished his real Part Two in 1615 — and inside it, his Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meet characters who have read the spurious version, and tell them how bad it was. The first known instance of a novelist responding to a forgery from inside his own novel.
He died the following year, in poverty, in Madrid.
The man who wrote it
Cervantes did not have an easy life.
At twenty-four he fought in the Battle of Lepanto (October 1571), one of the largest naval battles in history, against the Ottoman Empire. He was hit by three gunshots — two in the chest, one in the left hand. He survived. The hand was permanently disabled. For the rest of his life he was known in Spain as el manco de Lepanto, the one-handed man of Lepanto. He insisted, in print, that he was proud of the wound. (He was.)
Four years later, returning by ship from Naples to Spain, he was attacked by Algerian corsairs and the entire crew taken to Algiers as slaves. Cervantes spent the next five years in captivity. He attempted four escapes. Each time he was treated leniently for reasons North African historians still debate. His family ransomed him in 1580 by selling property and borrowing from neighbours.
Back in Spain he failed as a playwright, failed as a poet, and was hired as a commissary collecting grain for the Spanish Armada. The grain spoiled, the accounts were short, and he was excommunicated by the Church for taking provisions from a cathedral chapter house. Later he worked as a tax collector. Money he had deposited at a Seville bank disappeared in an embezzlement scandal that was not his fault, and he was thrown in jail anyway, in 1597. According to his own preface, he began writing Don Quixote in that jail.
He died on 22 April 1616, in a small house on Calle del León in Madrid, between a convent and a tavern. He was buried, as he had requested, in the convent. The exact location of his grave was lost. In 2015, a forensic team identified what are probably his remains.
The day he died — by the Julian calendar still used in England at the time — was the same day William Shakespeare died.
The joke he was making
The chivalric romances Cervantes was mocking — Amadís de Gaula, Tirante el Blanco, Palmerín de Inglaterra — were the YA fantasy of sixteenth-century Spain. Sprawling tales of knights performing impossible feats for impossibly perfect ladies, full of giants, dragons, magic, and wholesome violence. The Spanish reading public devoured them. Religious authorities periodically tried to ban them. The Inquisition burned some of them. Teresa of Ávila, the future saint, said her teenage addiction to them was the great sin of her youth.
Cervantes' joke was simple. What if a man who had read too many of these books actually believed them? What if he tried to live one? The most famous opening sentence in Spanish literature sets it up flat:
En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.
In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to recall, there lived not long ago one of those gentlemen who keep a lance in the rack, an old shield, a thin nag, and a greyhound for coursing.
The joke gets darker as the book goes on. Don Quixote charges windmills he believes are giants. He frees galley slaves who beat him in gratitude. He attacks a funeral procession. He falls in love with a peasant girl he has never met and elevates her, in his head, into Dulcinea del Toboso, queen of all chivalric ladies. Sancho Panza, hired as squire with the promise of an island to govern, watches all of it with the resigned realism of a man who has been hungry his entire life:
Mire vuestra merced —respondió Sancho— que aquellos que allí se parecen no son gigantes, sino molinos de viento, y lo que en ellos parecen brazos son las aspas, que, volteadas del viento, hacen andar la piedra del molino.
"Look, your worship," Sancho replied, "those things over there are not giants but windmills, and what look like their arms are sails, which the wind turns and makes the millstone go."
Quixote charges anyway.
What the joke became
Underneath the comedy is something stranger. Cervantes treats Don Quixote with a kind of love. The knight's delusion turns out to be more dignified than the cruelty of the world that mocks him. By Part Two, Cervantes' irony has thickened into something philosophers later spent four hundred years writing about. Borges, Nabokov, Foucault, Marx, Dostoevsky, Faulkner all wrote essays about Don Quixote. They all said roughly the same thing.
The joke turned out to contain the modern novel.
The trick — that you can have a hero who is wrong about the world he is in, and that the wrongness can be both funny and noble — is the trick every European novel after Cervantes either uses or reacts to. Madame Bovary is wrong about her novels in the same way Quixote is wrong about his. So is Emma Woodhouse in Pride and Prejudice. So is Frédéric Moreau. The form Cervantes invented in jail in Seville is the form we still read.
What was on Cervantes's shelf
Cervantes was reading two kinds of book before he wrote Quixote. The first was the chivalric romance — and his close descendants are still in print: Dumas's The Three Musketeers (1844) is the chivalric-novel tradition Cervantes was satirising, written down two centuries later by a writer who loved it without irony. The second was the late-medieval Italian frame-story tradition: Boccaccio's Decameron (~1353) is the foundational European book of stories-inside-a-story, the form Quixote deliberately breaks. Both sit on the same shelf at Storica.
The Spanish you read it in
Cervantes' Spanish is early modern. The vocabulary is wider than today's; some verb forms are archaic; and Don Quixote himself speaks an even more archaic Spanish — borrowed (often badly) from chivalric novels of the previous century — while Sancho Panza speaks the peasant Spanish of La Mancha, full of proverbs, mispronunciations, and rural humour. The two registers running side by side is most of the joke.
Reading the original at C1 or C2 is one of the great experiences of the Spanish language. Reading it in adaptation at A2+ is how most modern Spanish readers actually meet Cervantes. The plot survives. The dialogue survives. The running gag of the windmills, the proverbs, the inn-mistaken-for-a-castle survives. The two voices stay distinct. The point of the book, which is the relationship between a man who reads too much and a man who has not read at all, lands the same in any vocabulary.
By the end you have read, in Spanish, the book on every "first novel ever written" list in every literature department in the world. And you have read it in roughly the form Cervantes read it back to himself in 1604, sitting in jail, finishing what he assumed was a parody that would die with him.
I'm one of the makers of Storica, a daily reading club for the language you're learning. Don Quixote sits on the Spanish shelf at A2+, adapted into twenty-five short chapters with the windmills and the inns and the proverbs intact. Fifteen minutes a day, write a short reply at the end of each chapter, and you will have read the founding text of the modern novel — in Spanish — in under a month.