Cervantes

The life of Cervantes is told in this book based on the autobiographical fragments that the writer left in his works. He is the first narrator, therefore. But the biography reported here has been completed by adding research and findings by many authors, developed over more than a century and a half. They are incorporated into the narration successively and the reader increases his information both on the vital trace of the genius and on the history of his biography. The same method is applied to the publication history of his work to analyze how carrying out the most perfect edition of Don Quixote became an admirable intellectual competition. And also to tell how the author and his creations became universal myths and, specifically, Don Quixote in a kind of sacred text in which critics have found inexhaustible teachings. More than half of this book is dedicated to inquiring about the sources of the Prince of Wits. His creations were nurtured with his prodigious imagination and amazing narrative ability. Both served by the information of the curious and constant reader that was Cervantes and by the vicissitudes of his eventful life, which he turned entirely into literature. There are inclinations that are easy to detect in the books of the writer from Alcalá de Henares: popular literature, stories, advice and proverbs; the politics and society of his time, subjected to very profound but slow transformations, which allowed the men of his time to keep one foot in the past while the modern State was being formed. He was greatly interested in couple relationships, which fill his work more than any other plot. He joyfully made use of some of the most widespread beliefs in Europe of his time, such as witchcraft and enchantments. And he knew a lot about laws and justice. With these main ingredients and a great facility to seduce and entertain he amassed his dazzling literature. This book brings together and crosses, in a truly enriching and novel way, biography, literary criticism, the historical context and the analysis of the thematic groups that most attracted Cervantes, which he exposes with relentless meticulousness and erudition.