Miguel de Cervantes

#1On October 7, 1571, Miguel de Cervantes was twenty-four and sick with fever. A huge naval battle was about to begin in the Mediterranean, and he could have stayed out of it.

#2He fought anyway.

#3Three gunshots hit him. Two wounded his chest. Another left his left hand permanently impaired.

#4Decades later, people could still use that damaged hand against him. Cervantes's answer was to point back to where he'd received the wound:

#5the Battle of Lepanto.

#6For him, the injury wasn't just about what his hand could no longer do. The place where he'd been wounded mattered.

#7And surviving that battle turned out to be the easy part compared with what came next.

#8In 1575, Cervantes was sailing back to Spain with his brother Rodrigo when corsairs seized their ship.

#9The letters of recommendation Cervantes was carrying didn't help. They came from powerful men, and his captors took them as a sign that he might be worth a large ransom.

#10So instead of reaching Spain, Cervantes ended up in Algiers.

#11He'd spend nearly five years there.

#12He didn't just wait for somebody to buy his freedom.

#13In 1576, he tried to escape overland with other captives. Their guide disappeared. The attempt failed.

#14In 1577, after Rodrigo had already been ransomed, the brothers helped arrange a rescue ship. Cervantes and roughly fourteen captives hid near the coast waiting for it. Someone betrayed the plan.

#15In 1578, Cervantes tried to send a message to Oran asking for a guide who could help him escape. The messenger was caught.

#16Then, in 1579, he tried something bigger. More than sixty captives were involved in a plan to escape by sea. A fellow Spaniard, Juan Blanco de Paz, betrayed it.

#17Four attempts. Four failures.

#18But the pattern is worth noticing.

#19The more Cervantes failed, the bigger his escape plans became.

#20None of those four attempts got him out.

#21His freedom was being worked on somewhere else.

#22Back in Spain, his mother, Leonor de Cortinas, his sister Andrea, and other relatives kept raising ransom money. Then Juan Gil, a Trinitarian friar involved in freeing Christian captives by ransom, came to Algiers.

#23They were still short.

#24Gil helped raise the rest.

#25In September 1580, the full ransom of 500 gold escudos was finally assembled, and Cervantes went free.

#26He'd spent years trying to get himself out. In the end, he made it home because other people hadn't stopped trying to get him back.

#27He was thirty-three.

#28The war was over. Captivity was over.

#29That didn't mean life got easier.

#30Cervantes kept writing. He published "La Galatea" in 1585 and wrote for the stage. Some of his plays were performed.

#31But the career-changing success never came.

#32Meanwhile, Lope de Vega, a younger writer Cervantes himself had once praised, was becoming the dominant star of Spanish theater.

#33So Cervantes found other work.

#34He procured grain and supplies for the Crown. Later he collected taxes. He even applied for a government job in the Spanish Americas and didn't get it.

#35He wasn't living as some romantic figure who refused to do anything except write.

#36He needed an income.

#37And one of the jobs he took for that reason would put him behind bars again.

#38While collecting money for the Crown, Cervantes deposited public funds with a financier.

#39The financier went bankrupt.

#40The accounting problem came back to Cervantes, and in 1597 he was imprisoned in Seville.

#41He was fifty.

#42By then he'd been shot in battle, captured at sea, held for nearly five years, and defeated in four escape attempts. He'd returned to Spain, tried to build a literary career without a defining breakthrough, taken government work, and landed in prison.

#43And "Don Quixote" still hadn't appeared.

#44Years later, Cervantes would say that the book had been "engendered" in a prison.

#45That doesn't tell us exactly what happened there.

#46It's easy to turn that line into a neat scene: Cervantes goes to prison, writes his masterpiece, and comes out with "Don Quixote."

#47The evidence doesn't give us that story.

#48Cervantes said the work was "engendered" in prison. We don't know when he wrote its first surviving lines, how much he may have written there, or whether he already imagined the long novel that later appeared.

#49There's a gap.

#50He left prison.

#51A few years passed.

#52Then a country gentleman read far too many stories about wandering knights.

#53The man's name was Alonso Quijano.

#54He'd read so many chivalric romances—stories about knights roaming the world in search of adventures—that he decided he should become one himself.

#55He renamed himself Don Quixote. His unimpressive horse became Rocinante. An ordinary woman became, in his imagination, the noble Dulcinea.

#56Then he put on old armor and rode out.

#57Reality didn't cooperate.

#58He saw windmills and took them for giants. He charged. He went down.

#59Again and again, Don Quixote misunderstood the world, got beaten, humiliated himself, and failed.

#60Then he found another adventure.

#61There's no evidence that Cervantes simply copied his own failures into Don Quixote. One of the novel's clear targets was the conventions of the popular chivalric romances Cervantes had been reading and parodying.

#62Still, once you know his life, one parallel is hard to ignore.

#63In Algiers, failure hadn't stopped Cervantes either.

#64One escape failed. He tried another. Then another. Then another.

#65Decades later, he created a man who also didn't seem to understand failure as the end of the story.

#66By 1604, Cervantes was nearing fifty-seven.

#67The literary celebrity in Spain wasn't him. It was Lope de Vega.

#68A surviving letter from around that time shows Lope mocking Cervantes and the still-unpublished "Don Quixote."

#69Then the book appeared in 1605.

#70Readers responded.

#71Part One spread quickly, and new editions followed. Don Quixote became recognizable so fast that someone was already dressing as the character at a public celebration that same year.

#72At fifty-seven, Cervantes finally had the book that would define his name.

#73And before that year was over, he was caught up in another investigation.

#74In 1605, a man named Gaspar de Ezpeleta was stabbed near Cervantes's home in Valladolid.

#75Cervantes's household helped bring the wounded man inside. Ezpeleta later died, and an investigation followed.

#76Cervantes and members of his household were drawn into it. Cervantes was briefly detained.

#77That doesn't mean he killed Ezpeleta.

#78But the timing is hard to miss.

#79In 1605, "Don Quixote" became a success. In 1605, Cervantes was confined again.

#80This time, though, the next chapter was different.

#81He started publishing some of the most important work of his life.

#82"Novelas ejemplares" appeared in 1613. "Viaje del Parnaso" followed in 1614. A collection of plays and short comic interludes came in 1615.

#83So did Part Two of "Don Quixote."

#84Cervantes had been chasing a literary career for decades, but a remarkable amount of his major late work arrived near the end of his life.

#85Then somebody else published Don Quixote's next adventure first.

#86In 1614, a writer using the name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda published a continuation of "Don Quixote."

#87Cervantes hadn't written it.

#88More than four centuries later, Avellaneda's real identity is still unresolved.

#89Cervantes was already working on his own Part Two, so the fake sequel didn't make him begin it.

#90But it did get into the real novel.

#91In Cervantes's Part Two, characters learn that a false book about Don Quixote has been published. Don Quixote himself discovers that somebody has been writing adventures under his name.

#92Then he hears that the counterfeit Don Quixote went to Zaragoza.

#93So the real Don Quixote changes his route.

#94A fake book published in the real world altered the travel plans of a fictional character.

#95Cervantes had turned the theft of his character into material for that character's story.

#96Avellaneda's attack didn't stop with the book, either.

#97He went after Cervantes himself.

#98Avellaneda mocked Cervantes's age and disabled hand.

#99In the prologue to the authentic Part Two, Cervantes answered by returning to the place where that hand had been wounded.

#100Lepanto.

#101Forty-four years had passed since the twenty-four-year-old Cervantes had been shot there.

#102The injury from the beginning of his adult life had come back near the end of his writing life.

#103Then Cervantes gave Don Quixote something different from all those earlier defeats.

#104No next adventure.

#105At the end of Part Two, Don Quixote comes home.

#106His sanity returns, and he accepts that he isn't the wandering knight Don Quixote. He's Alonso Quijano.

#107He makes his will.

#108Then he dies.

#109After all those failures followed by another ride, there isn't another one.

#110But Cervantes still had another manuscript.

#111"Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda."

#112In April 1616, with death close, he was still preparing that book for publication.

#113Cervantes died on April 22.

#114"Persiles" appeared the following year.

#115Don Quixote had no next adventure.

#116The man who gave him that ending was still preparing the next book.

#117"Don Quixote" was translated into English in 1612, while Cervantes was still alive.

#118Soon afterward, an English play called "Cardenio" was recorded as the work of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. It's widely connected to the Cardenio episode in "Don Quixote."

#119Cervantes's Cardenio story is still here.

#120The Shakespeare play connected to it is lost.