Cervantes and the Spanish Golden Age

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) was born in Alcalá de Henares and led a famously turbulent life before turning to fiction: he lost the use of his left hand fighting at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, was captured by Barbary corsairs and held captive in Algiers from 1575 to 1580 until his family and religious orders ransomed him, and later worked as a tax collector and naval purveyor, a career marked by financial trouble and at least one imprisonment. He appears to have begun Don Quixote around the 1590s, and Part I, published in 1605, was an immediate popular success; a spurious sequel published in 1614 under the pseudonym 'Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda' spurred Cervantes to complete and publish his own Part II in 1615, shortly before his death in Madrid in 1616.