Cervantes has given literature one of its greatest comic figures in Don Quixote, that "muddle-headed fool with frequent lucid intervals". In English we "tilt at windmills" attacking imaginary obstacles in the manner of Don Quixote who mistook windmills for giants. Yet little is known about the author himself. None of the extant portraits of Miguel de Cervantes can be authenticated, and even the verbal description he offers of himself in the Prologue to his Exemplary Stories borders on self-parody. As an author he likes to hide behind his narrators and the man himself remains elusive, disappearing from his biographer's sight for months, even years, at a time.
Born in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, in September 1547, he was the third child of an impecunious surgeon with pretensions to nobility, who restlessly wandered from one city to another in an unsuccessful attempt to improve his lot. Cervantes himself was also to become a wanderer, dogged by poverty, an unhappy marriage, and a failure to achieve his professional ambitions until the very last years of his life.
Due to the itinerant life-style of the family, little is known of his formal education until he turns up in Madrid as a rather mature pupil of the Erasmist Juan López de Hoyos in 1568. In the next year 1569 his first pieces were published, four elegies on the death of Elizabeth of Valois, third wife of Philip II. A voracious reader (he refers to picking up scraps of paper in the streets of Toledo to satisfy his thirst for words in Don Quixote), it is generally believed that the undisciplined nature of his education is the main factor contributing to his originality. As Somerset Maugham commented, "Casting my mind's eye over the whole of fiction, the only absolutely original creation that I can think of is Don Quixote".
In 1569 he seems to have left Madrid rather suddenly, and documents discovered in the nineteenth century reveal that he was charged with wounding a man in a duel. He went to Italy, where he was briefly employed as chamberlain to a Cardinal Acquaviva. He then enlisted in the Spanish army and served with Don John of Austria's fleet when it won its decisive victory over the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. It was here that he lost his left hand as the result of a wound. Returning to Spain upon completion of his service in 1575, his ship was captured by Algerian pirates and he spent five years in captivity in Algiers until he was ransomed by Trinitarian monks – an experience he draws on both in his prose fiction and some of his plays.
Cervantes did not find it easy to become reintegrated into civilian life after a decade of soldiering and captivity abroad. It is probably no coincidence that many of the characters in his Exemplary Stories find themselves marginalized or isolated, some of them through temperament, others through some twist of fate. It is on these margins of conventional society, in a semi-literary and half-real landscape, that Cervantes locates many of his fictional worlds. His first full-length publication in 1585, however, was a relatively orthodox contribution to the vogue genre of the time, a pastoral romance entitled La Galatea. It was not an overwhelming success. His early forays into drama were also only moderately successful. By this time the Spanish theatre had been transformed by its most prolific exponent, Lope de Vega, who published his blueprint for the dramatic form in his New Art of Writing Plays in 1609. The full-length plays or comedias that have survived only serve to illustrate that Cervantes's talent lay in the more flexible form of prose narrative.
In 1584 – the same year he is believed to have fathered an illegitimate daughter, Isabel, by a certain Ana Franca de Rojas – he married Catalina de Salazar, a young woman half his age. The most notable fact about the marriage is that Cervantes spent little time in the marital home. As early as 1587 he began wandering the dry and dusty byways of Andalusia on a mule as a minor government functionary, first as a requisitioning commissary for the Armada as it prepared to sail for the Protestant England of Elizabeth I, and then as a tax-collector. In spite of successive major setbacks, such as not being paid for months on end and spending at least two periods in prison (in 1592 and 1597) for faulty accounting, he continued to work in Andalusia until about 1600. It was in prison in Seville that he gained first-hand experience of criminal life and inspiration for such stories as Rinconete and Cortadillo. Although he presents taking passage to the New World as the last resort of the desperate in The Jealous Old Man from Estremadure, Cervantes himself wrote a petition to the Council of the Indies in 1590 requesting a government post of some sort. This again met with failure and he continued to traverse southern Spain as a tax-collector. After a short period in Valladolid he returned to Madrid in 1605. The bulk of his work was published in the final ten years of his life, although much of it was written earlier. Don Quixote, Part I, was published in 1605, the Exemplary Stories in 1613; The Journey to Parnassus, his long, allegorical poem, in 1614, and The Eight Plays and Eight Interludes in 1615, along with Don Quixote, Part II. He remained in Madrid until his death on 22 April 1616, four days after completing the dedication to his final work, an epic romance entitled The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda, which was published posthumously the following year.
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