The History of Don Quixote De La Mancha
1605
The History of Don Quixote De La Mancha
1605
Translated by Peter Anthony Motteux
The novel that invented modern fiction. When Alonso Quijano, a gentleman of La Mancha, loses his mind to books of chivalry, he renames himself Don Quixote de la Mancha, arms himself with rusted armor, and rides forth on his emaciated horse Rocinante to revive the age of chivalry. His first adventure: mistaking a roadside inn for a castle, its prostitutes for noble ladies, and his own madness for divine purpose. He acquires a squire in the earthy farmer Sancho Panza, whose crude pragmatism becomes the perfect counterweight to Quixote's soaring delusions. Together they tilt at windmills, free convicts they mistake for oppressed knights, and wander from one comic disaster to the next. But beneath the laughter lies a question that still haunts us: is Quixote insane, or is he the only one brave enough to see the world as it should be rather than as it is? Cervantes created something unprecedented, a novel that is simultaneously the funniest and most tragic in Western literature, and the foundation upon which all subsequent fiction was built.
