In the early seventeenth century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless
veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. It
was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from reading too many
books of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and
sets off on hilarious adventures. That book, Don Quixote, went on to
sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its
author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human
history. Cervantes did more than just publish a bestseller, though. He
invented a way of writing. This book is about how Cervantes came to
create what we now call fiction, and how fiction changed the world.
The Man Who Invented Fiction explores Cervantes's life and the world
he lived in, showing how his influences converged in his work, and how
his work--especially Don Quixote--radically changed the nature of
literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, it
explains how that worldview went on to infiltrate art, politics, and
science, and how the world today would be unthinkable without it.
Four hundred years after Cervantes's death, William Egginton has brought
thrilling new meaning to an immortal novel.