TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: Birth of Cervantes [1547] best known for his book, Don Quixote de la Mancha. Think of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra as the Spanish language’s north star—the writer so towering that people still call Spanish la lengua de Cervantes (“the language of Cervantes”). He’s widely regarded as the greatest writer in Spanish and one of the world’s pre-eminent novelists. His masterpiece, Don Quixote, often hailed as the first modern novel, isn’t just a classic of Western literature; it helped set the template for the novel as we know it—character-driven, self-aware, and playful about the line between reality and imagination. Cervantes lived from 1547 to 1616, right through the climax and the unraveling of Spain’s Golden Age. He absorbed the era’s big tensions—imperial pride, religious conflict, economic strain—and filtered them into humane, often comic art. He believed in noble ideals even as he watched them collide with messy reality, which is ex...