Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares, Spain in 1547, the son of an impoverished barber-surgeon who may have been a minor noble—or posed as one. Little is known of Cervantes' life until, at 23, he went to Italy—by some accounts, fleeing justice after a duel—to join Spain's war against the Ottoman Empire, losing his left arm in the Battle of Lepanto. Sailing home, he was captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in Algiers. Eventually ransomed by his family, he returned home in 1580 deeply in debt to his rescuers. He published an unsuccessful novel, La Galatea, married a woman twenty years his junior and, denied permission to emigrate to the New World, became a tax collector. Subsequently, he was imprisoned at least twice for account "irregularities". During one of those imprisonments—in LaMancha—he conceived the satire of chivalry that became his masterwork, Don Quixote. It gained widespread popularity and notoriety for its unprecedented use of vernacular Spanish, and for defying the tenets of the long dominant romantic genre. His subsequent collection, Exemplary Novellas, gained even greater acclaim in 1613. Success allowed him to retire to Madrid to write, and he completed a final novel, The Exploits of Persiles and Sigismunda three days before he died on April 23, 1616—the same day as William Shakespeare.