The Life of Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes lived a life stranger than any fiction he ever wrote. Born into modest circumstances, he fought at the Battle of Lepanto, was captured by Barbary pirates, and spent five years in Algiers bargaining for his freedom. Upon returning to Spain, he found himself a failed playwright and struggling novelist in a society that offered him little but criticism. Yet from this crucible of disappointment came Don Quixote, the novel that invented modern fiction as we know it. Calvert traces this improbable arc with scholarly precision, showing how the wounds of a soldier, the humiliations of a captive, and the petty cruelties of literary rivals all fed the genius of a man who changed literature forever. For anyone who has marveled at the knight-errant and his faithful squire, this biography reveals the extraordinary flesh-and-blood writer behind the masterpiece.