Soldier, slave, debtor, tax collector — Cervantes (1547–1616) lived the biography before writing the book. The wound at Lepanto crippled his left hand for life; five years enslaved in Algiers ended only when his family raised the ransom. Late and poor, he wrote Don Quixote (1605, 1615) — the story of an aging gentleman undone by chivalric romances, very widely called the first modern novel for its sustained irony, unreliable narrator, psychological depth, and self-conscious fictionality. He died in 1616, the same year as Shakespeare. Spanish is still called the language of Cervantes.
Miguel de Cervantes called himself the one-handed man of Lepanto. A gunshot wound at that great sea battle had crippled his left hand for life, and he wore the injury as a badge of honor. War was only the start of his misfortunes. Barbary corsairs captured him and sold him into slavery in Algiers, where he spent five years and tried four times to escape. Ransomed at last, he came home to no reward, scraped by as a tax collector, and landed in prison over tangled accounts. He was older, poor, and still far from secure when he wrote the book that made him immortal. Don Quixote, the tale of a gentleman who reads too many knightly romances and rides out to fight windmills he takes for giants, is very widely called the first modern novel. The broken soldier had helped create a new way of telling the truth about human beings.