The first modern novel was about a man ruined by reading novels
Alonso Quijano, a minor nobleman nearing fifty, read so many tales of chivalry that he put on old armour and rode out as a knight. Miguel de Cervantes published his story in 1605, added a sequel in 1615, and gave the world what many call the first modern novel, plus the word quixotic.
Quijano is a hidalgo, the lowest rung of Spanish nobility, living frugally in a deliberately vague corner of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. Renamed Don Quixote, he mistakes an inn for a castle and asks the innkeeper, whom he takes for its lord, to knight him. The innkeeper plays along, and the new knight spends the night guarding a horse trough he imagines is a chapel.
His good deeds tend to backfire. He orders a farmer to stop beating a servant boy named Andres, and the beating resumes twice as hard once he rides away. Later he recruits a poor neighbour, Sancho Panza, as squire with the promise of a small governorship, and the pair famously attack windmills that Quixote believes are giants. Sancho's earthy humour plays against his master's grand speeches throughout.
Cervantes toys with authorship. He claims most of the tale was translated from an Arabic manuscript by a Moorish historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli. For its first readers, the 1605 book was a complete single volume, and its hint of further adventures was a standard convention rather than a promise. Ten years later Part Two appeared, and in it characters have read Part One and recognise the knight and his squire, an early experiment in metafiction.
The influence spread widely. Nineteenth-century French writers referred to it directly, including Alexandre Dumas in The Three Musketeers and Edmond Rostand in Cyrano de Bergerac. Mark Twain credited the book with sweeping away admiration for medieval chivalry. It ranks among the most translated and best-selling books ever written and is often treated as a cornerstone of Western literature.
Source: Don Quixote
