Quixote!
About the Story
Miguel de Cervantes was a playwright, poet, and most notably a novelist. Don Quixote is Miguel de Cervantes’ most famous work and is considered one of the greatest novels ever written. An immediate success, the novel was originally entitled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha and was published in 1605. Ten years later, Cervantes published a sequel and now the two volumes are published together as one book. Cervantes married in 1584 and some scholars believe the character of Don Quixote was inspired by Cervantes father-in-law. Many of the popular novels of Cervantes’ time featured the adventures of wandering knights as they battled giants and sorcerers and rescued princesses. Don Quixote parodies this type of novel and depicts the world of ordinary people including tavern owners, innkeepers, and muleteers and uses elements of satire, farce, parody, and slapstick humor. The influence of the novel has been far reaching. Today, the phrase “tilting at windmills” is used to describe the act of attacking imaginary enemies, and “quixotic” has come to mean “foolishly impractical.” Don Quixote has been adapted and made into several movies, a ballet, and the Tony Award winning musical, Man of la Mancha (1965).
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