Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote — published in two parts in 1605 and 1615 — is widely called the first modern novel and one of the greatest books ever written. Alonso Quijano, an aging country gentleman of La Mancha, has read so many romances of chivalry that his wits give way, and he resolves to become a knight-errant himself. He renames his broken-down horse Rocinante, christens himself Don Quixote, elects a farm-girl as the great lady Dulcinea, and rides out in rusty armour in search of adventure.

With the credulous, proverb-spouting peasant Sancho Panza for a squire, he charges windmills he takes for giants, mistakes inns for castles and flocks for armies, and is beaten and mocked at every turn — yet his faith repairs itself each time, for the world has not failed his vision; only some envious enchanter has transformed it. Beneath the comedy runs the deepest of questions: whether his madness is folly or a kind of saintly wisdom, and what it costs to live by a code the age has outgrown.

Cervantes tells the story with startlingly modern art — pretending to be only the editor of a manuscript by the invented Moorish chronicler Cide Hamete Benengeli, and, in the second part, letting his characters know they are already famous in a book the whole world has read. The novel that taught all later fiction what it could do ends on one of the most moving notes in literature, as the knight recovers his reason only to lose the dream that made him himself.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation of John Ormsby (1885) in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.