Who Was Miguel de Cervantes?
Miguel de Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547, in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, to a barber-surgeon father whose financial troubles kept the family moving between towns. Little is documented about his early education, but by the early 1570s he had become a soldier, serving with Spanish forces in the Mediterranean. At the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 he was badly wounded, losing the use of his left hand – an injury he wore for the rest of his life as a mark of honor rather than misfortune.
In 1575, while returning to Spain, Cervantes was captured by Algerian pirates and sold into slavery in Algiers, where he remained for five years. He attempted escape multiple times, and his evident leadership among the captives raised his ransom price considerably. He was finally ransomed in 1580 through the efforts of Trinitarian friars and his family, who had to raise a substantial sum.
Cervantes's literary career was, for most of his life, a financial disappointment. He worked as a tax collector and government functionary, was twice imprisoned over accounting irregularities, and published Don Quixote, Part I, in 1605 to immediate popular success that did little to relieve his poverty. He married Catalina de Salazar in 1584; the marriage produced no children, though Cervantes had a daughter, Isabel, from an earlier relationship. He published Part II of Don Quixote in 1615, partly spurred by an unauthorized sequel written by another author, and died in Madrid on April 22, 1616.
Cervantes is significant for TLA because Don Quixote stages, with sustained comic and tragic depth, the collision between a vision of the world organized around chivalric honor, justice, and meaning, and a world that has stopped believing in any of these things. Don Quixote's madness is, on one reading, simply madness; on another, it is the last man in Spain still acting as though the moral categories everyone else has quietly abandoned were real.
In Their Own Words
“Too much sanity may be madness – and maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”
– attributed, Don Quixote“Who is more crazy: the man who knows the world is a windmill and lives accordingly, or the man who believes it is a giant and so fights it?”
– paraphrase, Don Quixote“Until death, it is all life.”
– attributedSelected Bibliography
- Don Quixote, Part I – 1605
- Don Quixote, Part II – 1615
- Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Stories) – 1613
- The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda – 1617, posthumous