Who wrote Don Quixote?

Cervantes, whose life reads as improbable. He fought at Lepanto in 1571 and took three gunshot wounds, one permanently maiming his left hand; he was captured by Barbary corsairs on the voyage home and spent five years enslaved in Algiers, attempting escape four times and surviving each attempt; he was ransomed, worked as a tax collector, and was imprisoned twice over accounting irregularities. He published the first part of Don Quixote at 58.

It is routinely called the first modern novel, and the case rests on what it does with its own fiction. The second part, published ten years later, is set in a world where the characters have read the first part and are famous because of it - so Quixote meets people who know him from a book, and complains at length about an unauthorised sequel that had actually been published by someone else in the interim. A novel arguing with its own fan fiction in 1615.

The book is a parody of chivalric romances, a genre so popular that Cervantes was writing against an industry. It outlived every one of the books it mocked, which is the usual fate of the target and an unusual one for the parody. He died in 1616, days from Shakespeare, and both dates are complicated by Spain and England using different calendars at the time.