Authors

Miguel de Cervantes

mee-GEL day sair-VAHN-tess

Also Known As Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Citation Formats

General Reference

Literature Atlas. "Miguel de Cervantes." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://literature.interactiveatlas.org/authors/miguel-de-cervantes.

APA Style

Literature Atlas. (n.d.). Miguel de Cervantes. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://literature.interactiveatlas.org/authors/miguel-de-cervantes

BibTeX

@misc{literatureatlas-miguel-de-cervantes,
  author = {Literature Atlas},
  title = {Miguel de Cervantes},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://literature.interactiveatlas.org/authors/miguel-de-cervantes},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Spanish novelist, poet and playwright, best known as the author of Don Quixote (1605, with a second part in 1615), a work widely credited as foundational to the modern novel. Cervantes served as a soldier and was wounded at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, then spent five years in captivity in Algiers after being captured by Barbary pirates, an ordeal that shaped episodes throughout his fiction. He wrote extensively beyond Don Quixote, including the pastoral romance La Galatea, the Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels), and the posthumously published romance Persiles y Sigismunda.

Facts

Birth Year

1547 1

Death Year

1616 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

Held Differently

The Novel

Why this is disputed. Cervantes and Don Quixote (1605) are one of several candidates scholars have proposed for the "first novel," alongside Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, Petronius' Satyricon and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; see The First Novel Question.

Source Novel (Wikipedia)