How Miguel de Cervantes created Don Quixote.

How Miguel de Cervantes created Don Quixote.

In the early 1600s, Spain was packed with wildly popular chivalric adventure books—stories of perfect knights, magic, and heroic quests. Cervantes thought they were ridiculous. So he had an idea: what if he created a man who took those books way too seriously?

Enter Alonso Quixano: an aging, book-obsessed gentleman who reads so many tales of knights that he decides to become one himself. Cervantes designed him as a satire—someone noble in spirit, but delusional in practice.

But here’s the twist: while Don Quixote was meant to mock fantasy stories, he also became deeply human. Cervantes gave him heart, idealism, and a tragic charm that made readers root for him.

The result? The first modern novel—built from a joke that became a masterpiece. And that’s how Don Quixote rode out of Cervantes’ imagination and into literary history.

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