The history and adventures of the renowned Don Quixote by Cervantes Saavedra
"The history and adventures of the renowned Don Quixote" by Cervantes Saavedra is a novel written in the early 17th century. It satirizes the fad for chivalric romances through the misadventures of an aging La Mancha hidalgo who remakes himself as a knight-errant, with his earthy squire Sancho Panza in tow. Comic and compassionate, it explores the tension between idealism and reality as its hero reads the world through the fantasies he
adores. The opening of the book includes a substantial biographical sketch praising the author’s courage and ingenuity through hardship, a translator’s note pledging to preserve the work’s humor and tone, and a playful preface in which a friend advises the writer to fabricate scholarly trappings. The story then begins with a frugal country gentleman who reads so many tales of knighthood that he loses his wits, refurbishes ancestral armor, fashions a pasteboard visor, names his horse Rozinante, himself Don Quixote de La Mancha, and his imagined lady Dulcinea del Toboso. He sets out unknighted, trusting he’ll be dubbed later, and promptly mistakes an inn for a castle, two prostitutes for noble ladies, and a landlord for a castellan; the scene closes with the women trying to remove his armor while his helmet is hopelessly fastened. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547-1616 |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Stothard, Thomas, 1755-1834 |
| Translator | Smollett, T. (Tobias), 1721-1771 |
| Title | The history and adventures of the renowned Don Quixote |
| Original Publication | London: Harrison & Co., 1782. |
| Credits | Tim Lindell, David King, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese |
| Subject | Spain -- Social life and customs -- 16th century -- Fiction |
| Subject | Knights and knighthood -- Spain -- Fiction |
| Subject | Picaresque literature |
| Subject | Romances |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77095 |
| Release Date | Oct 20, 2025 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 842 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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