Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra

One of the characters of the show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1968) was named after Cervantes' creation - a donkey named Don Quixote, who lives in a place called Someplace Else.

His last work, which Cervantes himself believed to be his finest, was "The Travails of Persiles and Segismunda", published posthumously in 1617, but history has not shared Cervantes' judgment of that work. It has rarely been translated into English.

He died of dropsy on April 23, 1616, but in an especially ironic twist, his gravesite is lost.

His one-act "Eight Interludes", published in 1615, were written, unlike his full-length plays, mostly in prose, and mostly in the colloquial style which was his alone. They were considered unworthy of his abilities for a fairly long time, but have lately come to be highly regarded by critics. Cervantes was told by the playhouse manager that they did not measure up to the works of other playwrights of the era, which made Cervantes quite angry; but optimistic about their chances, he published them so that at least the reading public might know them. They have appeared, like the "Exemplary Stories", in several English translations, but have never gained as wide a public as "Don Quixote". In recent years, some of them have even been performed in English.

His other highly regarded works are his collection of "Exemplary Stories", published in 1613, and his "Eight Interludes", published in 1615.

Finally, in 1605, he published the first part of the novel which gave him immortality, the brilliant and unforgettable "Don Quixote de La Mancha", which was supposed to be a satire on the chivalric novels of the time, but was actually a work unlike anything anyone else had ever written (the second part followed ten years later, after the success of the first had produced a plagiarized sequel that not only coarsened the satire but contained openly insulting remarks about Cervantes). "Don Quixote"'s surface seems comic, but Cervantes, finally writing in his own personal style and no one else's, created two characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, to whom he gives more multi-layered depth than anyone else up to that time had given characters, except possibly the depth that William Shakespeare had given to Hamlet. The novel "Don Quixote" itself becomes an ironic mixture of comedy, humiliation, disillusionment and tragedy. All of its characters, except those in the interpolated romance novels, are believable and each reacts to Don Quixote's madness in an illuminating way. "Don Quixote" was immensely successful in its time, but it did not make Cervantes a wealthy man.

English translations of "Don Quixote" have frequently been published at intervals. There was only one in the 1600s, but there were at least three during the 1700s, three or four more between 1881 and 1899, three between 1949 and 1957, and there have since been three more published between 1993 and 2003.

He fathered a daughter out of wedlock, and entered into an unhappy marriage in 1584. He took on a series of odd jobs to make ends meet. His financial difficulties netted him three or more prison terms and an excommunication by the Spanish Inquisition, although it was clear he never committed any crimes.

The Cervantes family was able to ransom Rodrigo but not Miguel, and he remained in captivity until 1580, when he was finally ransomed by two Trinitarian friars. He then began a writing career, which was at first completely unsuccessful due to the fact that Cervantes deliberately tried to write the kind of plays and poetry popular at the time, and to imitate their style, something he was woefully inadequate at doing.

Returning home with his brother Rodrigo in 1575, they were captured by the Barbary pirates and sold into slavery. He and his fellow captives made three attempts to escape, all unsuccessful - one because they were betrayed by a fellow captive. In each attempt Cervantes deliberately shouldered the blame on himself, in an attempt to shield his fellow captives from torture. The Turkish Bey was so impressed with his perhaps foolhardy audacity that he spared him each time.

In 1571 he became a soldier and fought in the famous Battle of Lepanto that pitted Spain against Turkish forces. Being ill with fever at the time, and wishing to prove his bravery, he asked to be put in the most dangerous fighting position on his ship. He was, and received two wounds in the chest and one in his left hand, which rendered him disabled for life.

In 1570 he obtained a position as a kind of secretary to Cardinal Aquaviva in Rome.

Miguel de Cervantes' baptism occurred on October 9, 1547, at Alcala de Henares, Spain, so it is reasonable to assume he was born around that time, and Alcala de Henares has long claimed itself as his birthplace. The son of Rodrigo de Cervantes, an itinerant and not-too-successful surgeon, Miguel was educated by monks as he and his family wandered from city to city.