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Reading lists

An editor’s guide to the VINTAGE European Classics series

Don Quixote Of The Mancha

Miguel de Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547, in Alcala de Henares, Spain. At twenty-three he enlisted in the Spanish militia and in 1571 fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto, where a gunshot wound permanently crippled his left hand. He spent four more years at sea and then another five as a slave after being captured by Barbary pirates. Ransomed by his family, he returned to Madrid but his disability hampered him; it was in debtor's prison that he began to write Don Quixote. Cervantes wrote many other works, including poems and plays, but he remains best known as the author of Don Quixote. He died on April 23, 1616.

The story of the Spanish knight Don Quizote whose devotion to the tales of chivalry leads him into a series of bizarre adventures in the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, blends fantasy, comedy and gripping narrative in a way that has appealed to children ever since it was first published. All the wisdom and humour of Cervantes' great seventeenth-century classic are to be found in Parry's very readable modern abridgement, enhanced by the delightful illustrations of Walter Crane, one of the greatest of all English children's book illustrators.

Don Quixote

The first great novel - and perhaps still the most influential - Don Quixote contains within it all the seeds of modern fiction. A fantastic compound of reality and illusion in which the besotted Don Quixote and his down-to-earth companion, the faithful Sancho Panza, set out to right the world's wrongs in knightly combat, the narrative moves from philosophical speculation to broad comedy, taking in pastoral, farce and fantasy on the way. Between the Don's dreams of chivalry which inaugurate the novel, and his death which concludes it, Cervantes explores a range of experience and feeling worthy of his great contemporary, Shakespeare.

Miguel De Cervantes (Author) Miguel de Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547, in Alcala de Henares, Spain. At twenty-three he enlisted in the Spanish militia and in 1571 fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto, where a gunshot wound permanently crippled his left hand. He spent four more years at sea and then another five as a slave after being captured by Barbary pirates. Ransomed by his family, he returned to Madrid but his disability hampered him; it was in debtor's prison that he began to write Don Quixote. Cervantes wrote many other works, including poems and plays, but he remains best known as the author of Don Quixote. He died on April 23, 1616.

Miguel De Cervantes

Edith Grossman

TRANSLATED BY EDITH GROSSMAN 
 
Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain.

Miguel De Cervantes

Don Quixote

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