Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcalá de Henares in 1547. As a young soldier he fought at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, where he received three gunshot wounds; he lost the use of his left hand for the rest of his life — he later said it was to glorify his right. Returning to Spain by sea in 1575 he was captured by Algerian corsairs and spent five years as a slave before being ransomed. He worked the rest of his life as a tax-collector and supplier to the Spanish Armada, was repeatedly imprisoned for debt, and at fifty-seven published the First Part of The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha (1605) — the story of an elderly hidalgo who, having read too many chivalric romances, sets out to revive knight-errantry. The Second Part appeared in 1615. The book invented the modern novel: irony, unreliable narration, characters who read about themselves, the gap between idealism and the world it meets. He died in Madrid in 1616, ten days before Shakespeare.
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Novelist · Author of Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
1,547 CE – 1,616 CE
The wounded Spanish soldier who wrote the first modern novel — and who lost the use of his left hand at Lepanto so, as he later said, his right hand could write better.
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