Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes lost the use of his left hand at Lepanto, spent five years as a slave in Algiers, worked as a tax collector and was jailed for its irregularities, and published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605, at fifty-seven, after decades of failure as a playwright. The novel, in which a country gentleman driven mad by chivalric romances sets out to be a knight, with a peasant on a donkey as his squire, was a bestseller across Europe within a year, and the second part of 1615 answered a pirated sequel. He died the same week as Shakespeare. Most later novels descend from his.