Don Quixote features two of the most beloved characters in classical literature. Don Quixote and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, embark on comical exploits that are as charming today as they were when the book was published nearly 400 years ago. After reading chivalric romances, Don Quixote becomes infatuated with the idea of being a heroic knight and with the help of his squire sets out to do exactly that. Although Sancho’s adventures continually get him into trouble, he grows and learns from those mishaps, becoming a character that will enchant the listener long after the last words. When originally published, Don Quixote was what would today be considered experimental fiction. It would go on to influence some of the most prolific authors in history, including Sterne, Dickens, Melville, as well as a host of others. Modern scholars consider Don Quixote to be the most influential work of literature to come out of the Spanish Golden Age. ~From the Amazon description here.Author's background lost to posterity?
Four generations had laughed over Don Quixote before it occurred to anyone to ask who and what manner of man was this Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra whose name is on the title-page. And it was too late for a satisfactory answer to the question when it was proposed to add a life of the author to the London edition published at Lord Carteret's insistence in 1738. All traces of the personality of Cervantes had by that time disappeared. Any floating traditions that may once have existed, transmitted from men who had known him, had long since died out. There were no records, for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were incurious as to "the men of the time," a reproach against which the nineteenth has, at any rate, secured itself, as it has produced no Shakespeare or Cervantes. All that Mayans y Siscar, to whom the task was entrusted, or any of those who followed him -- Rios, Pellicer, or Navarrete -- could do was to eke out the few allusions Cervantes makes to himself in his various prefaces with such pieces of documentary evidence bearing upon his life as they could find.Really?~Quoted from this eBay listing.
The last paragraph's contention that the author's life is relatively unknown is rather well refuted by Britannica's extensive article here.
Don Quixote is considered by literary historians to be one of the more important books of all time, and it is often cited as the first modern novel. The character of Quixote became an archetype, and the word quixotic, which is used to mean the impractical pursuit of idealistic goals, thus entered common usage.
