Byron, William

Garden City. 1978. Doubleday. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket With A Few Tears. 0385002793. 583 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Ronald Clyne. keywords: Literature Biography Spain. FROM THE PUBLISHER - A dramatic life-and-times biography of Cervantes, creator of the immortal book Don Quixote. When the first part of his classic book was published, in 1605, Cervantes was fifty-seven years old, and his life up until that time had been a difficult and harsh one. What was it about this seemingly unremarkable man that enabled him to produce a book, late in life, that is among the most influential novels ever written? This is the first full-scale biography of Cervantes to use modem scholars hip and up-to-date research in an attempt to show the life of Cervantes as it really was. CERVANTES: A BIOGRAPHY goes beyond the myths that have surrounded the man, and presents him as he really was - drifter, tax collector, trader, captive of Barbary pirates, tormented man, journeyman writer. His life was a pilgrimage through servitudes that both mirrored and surpassed his time and place. Europe during Cervantes' lifetime was torn by religious and social turmoil. The secure values of the Middle Ages were crumbling before the advance of new visions of truth. In no country was the crisis more acute than in Spain. By the end of the sixteenth century, the country that less than a generation earlier had been the most powerful in the world was being pushed into the margins of history, its myth of invincibility in ruins. In William Byron's sympathetic biography, we see Cervantes against the background of his times, exploring the shifting boundaries of truth and illusion. The result was his work - a stream of stories, elegant, wise and generous, that set Western fiction on the road it is still traveling. In them, Cervantes transformed the sorrows of his own life into a hymn to the splendor of the human spirit. inventory #1936 ISBN: 0385002793.