On January 16, 1605, Miguel de Cervantes El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, better known as Don Quixote, is published. The book is considered by many to be the first modern novel as well as one of the greatest novels of all time.
The protagonist is a minor nobleman, Alonso Quixano, whose obsessive reading of chivalrous novels drives him mad. He adopts the name Don Quixote and, along with his squire Sancho Panza, wanders around La Mancha, a central region of Spain, taking on a number of challenges that exist entirely in his mind. Quixote attacks a group of monks, a flock of sheep and, above all, windmills he believes to be giants. The episodic story is intentionally comedic, and its deliberately archaic language contributes to its satirization of older stories of knights and their deeds.
The novel was an immediate success, although Cervantes only made a modest profit from his publication rights. It was republished in Spain and Portugal within the year. Over the next decade it was translated and republished across Europe and read widely in the American colonies of Spain. Over the following centuries, critics continued to praise, analyze, and reinterpret Don Quixote. Many analyzes focus on the theme of the imagination and the more subversive elements of the text, which has been taken as a satire on orthodoxy, chivalry, patriotism and even the concept of objective reality. The novel spawned a number of idioms now common in Spanish and other languages, including the English phrase “tilting windmills” and the word “quixotic”. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, another novel often called one of the greatest of all time, was heavily influenced by Don Quixote, just like the enormous influence of Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which explicitly refers to the work of Cervantes. Cerebral, comical and revolutionary, Don Quixote endured in a way that only a few select novels could.
READ MORE: After 400 years, investigators find the remains of Miguel de Cervantes, the creator of Don Quixote
