Miguel de Cervantes

Author of Don Quixote (two parts, 1605 and 1615), baptized in Alcalá de Henares on 9 October 1547 and dead in Madrid in 1616. Soldier at Lepanto — where he lost the use of his left hand — five years a captive in Algiers, later a tax collector and jailed for his accounts: the biography behind the novel is itself the story of imperial Spain from below.