Don quixote/miguel de cervantes

According to tradition, Cervantes first conceived his comic masterpiece in jail - his avowed intent being to debunk the romances of chivalry.

From first publication, Don Quixote was a best-seller, initially taken as a knockabout account of a mad Spanish gentleman and his cowardly peasant squire, but later reinterpreted as an enlightenment text, a representation of universal human nature, a myth of a tragic hero defending mans nobler aspirations, a study in alienation, a spiritual autobiography, a metaphor for Spains imperial decline, an experimental novel that shaped later prose fiction, a tragedy and a comedy in one, and a demonstration that ambiguity and uncertainty can lie at the centre of great art and that great art can be comic.

Tobias Smolletts vigorous and lively translation brilliantly catches the feeling and tone of the Spanish original.

It is a comic novelists homage to a comic novelist.