Don Quixote, Part 1: The First Part of the Delightful History of the Most Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of the Mancha (The Harvard Classics, deluxe edition, registered, Volume 14)

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA was born at Alcala de Henares in Spain in 1547, of a noble Castilian family. Nothing is certainly known of his education, but by the age of twenty-three we find him serving in the army as a private soldier. He was maimed for life at the battle of Lepanto, shared in a number of other engagements, and was taken captive by the Moors on his way home in 1575. After five years of slavery he was ransomed; and two or three years later he returned to Spain, and betook himself to the profession of letters. After a period of obscurity, he issued, in 1605, his masterpiece, "Don Quixote." Its success was great and immediate, and its reputation soon spread beyond Spain. Translations of parts into French appeared; and in 1611 Thomas Shelton, an Englishman otherwise unknown, put forth the present version, in style and vitality, if not in accuracy, acknowledged the most fortunate of English renderings. The present volume contains the whole of the first part of the novel, which is complete in itself. The second part, issued in 1615, the year before his death, is of the nature of a sequel, and is generally regarded as inferior. It remains unsurpassed as a masterpiece of droll humor, as a picture of Spanish life, as a gallery of immortal portraits. It has in the highest degree the mark of all great art, the successful combination of the particular and the universal: it is true to the life of the country and age of its production, and true also to general human nature everywhere and always. With reference to the fiction of the Middle Ages, it is a triumphant satire; with reference to modern novels, it is the first and the most widely enjoyed. In its author's words: "It is so conspicuous and void of difficulty that children may handle him, youths may read him, men may understand him, and old men may celebrate him."