Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, playwright and soldier who was born in 1547 and died in 1616. He is considered to be the most important writers of Spanish literature of all times, and his masterpiece, El Quijote (published between 1605 and 1615), is often quoted as the first novel in the modern sense of the word.

Life

Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares. His father was a minor doctor and descendant of New Christians, meaning his family ancestors were Jews who had become Catholics to avoid expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. In 1551, Cervantes and his family moved to Valladolid and then to Cordoba to escape from family debts and creditors. There is no certain information about Cervantes's first studies but it is certain that he did not attend university and that he studied in a Jesuit school.

In 1566 he settled in Madrid were he studied in El Estudio de la Villa, a grammar school. He published two poems as part of a book whose main author was his teacher. While living in Madrid, he started going often to theatre plays and became interested in playwrights. Between 1569 and 1570, Cervantes travelled to Italy, where he was imbued in the cultural environment, reading Ariosto's and others' poetry. That way, he was influenced by neoplatonism, a philosophical view that can be found in many of his works, especially in those about love. After serving as a Catholic cardinal, he enrolled in the Spanish Army and fought in the Battle of Lepanto, where he lost the mobility of his left hand. Taking part in this battle was a reason for pride, and Cervantes wrote in El Quijote that the battle has been "the most noble and memorable event that past centuries have seen or future can ever hope to witness".

Five years later, while travelling from Naples, Italy to Spain, his ship was captured by Muslim pirates. He spent five years imprisoned in Argel in very poor conditions. To show his heroic behaviour while he was his imprisoned he wrote Topografía, a book about his captivity of disputed authorship.

After attempting three unsuccessful jailbreaks, in 1580 he was able to return to Spain. One year later he wrote his first important and long work, La Galatea, an idyll describing rustic life in which it is possible to track the influence of the Italian pastoral books he read while in Italy. He also wrote many short comical plays, generically called entremés. In those days he also entered an fulfilling married life and wrote El juez de los divorcios an entremés which deals for the very first time in Spanish literature with the issue of divorce. Due to this fulfilling marriage, he travelled a lot around the south of Spain, specially Andalucia.

Around 1587 he settle in Seville, working as a tax collector. It is in that same city where he was imprisoned in 1597, accused over the bankruptcy of the bank where he was working. While in prison, he started thinking about or writing El Quijote, or at least this is what he explains in the introduction of the work. After being released and spending some years in Cordoba, around 1604, he moved to Valladolid, seat of King Philip III's court. One year later, he published the first part or El Quijote. Before he published the second part, he wrote the Novelas ejemplares (1613), a group of 12 short narrations of various styles and issues, some of them written years previously, and Viaje del Parnaso (1514), a long poem. He died in Madrid in 1616, one year after publishing the second part of his masterpiece. After his death another interesting novel was published, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, a Byzantine novel.