Don Quixote (c1610). The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, or just Don Quixote, is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes. Published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. A founding work of Western literature, it is often labeled the first modern novel and is sometimes considered the best literary work ever written. The plot revolves around the adventures of a noble from La Mancha named Alonso Quixano, who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant to revive chivalry and serve his nation, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing with Don Quixote's rhetorical monologues on knighthood, already considered old-fashioned at the time. Don Quixote, in the first part of the book, does not see the world for what it is and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story. The book had a major influence on the literary community, as evidenced by direct references in Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as the word quixotic and the epithet Lothario; the latter refers to a character in El curioso impertinente, an intercalated story that appears in Part One, chapters 33-35. The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer cited Don Quixote as one of the four greatest novels ever written, along with Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Heloise, and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. When first published, Don Quixote was usually interpreted as a comic novel. After the French Revolution, it was better known for its central ethic that individuals can be right while society is quite wrong and seen as disenchanting. In the 19th century, it was seen as a social commentary, but no one could easily tell whose side Cervantes was on. Many critics came to view the work as a tragedy in which Don Quixote's idealism and nobility are viewed by the post-chivalric world as insane, and are defeated and rendered useless by common reality. By the 20th century, the novel had come to occupy a canonical space as one of the foundations of modern literature. Cervantes wrote that the first chapters were taken from the archives of La Mancha, and the rest were translated from an Arabic text by the Moorish author Cide Hamete Benengeli. This metafictional trick appears to give a greater credibility to the text, implying that Don Quixote is a real character and that the events related truly occurred several decades prior to the recording of this account. However, it was also common practice in that era for fictional works to make some pretense of being factual, such as the common opening line of fairy tales Once upon a time in a land far away. In the course of their travels, the protagonists meet innkeepers, prostitutes, goat-herders, soldiers, priests, escaped convicts and scorned lovers. The aforementioned characters sometimes tell tales that incorporate events from the real world, like the conquest of the Kingdom of Maynila or battles in the Eighty Years' War. Their encounters are magnified by Don Quixote's imagination into chivalrous quests. Don Quixote's tendency to intervene violently in matters irrelevant to himself, and his habit of not paying debts, result in privations, injuries, and humiliations. Finally, Don Quixote is persuaded to return to his home village. The narrator hints that there was a third quest, but says that records of it have been lost. Alonso Quixano, the protagonist of the novel, is a Hidalgo, nearing 50 years of age, living in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and housekeeper, as well as a boy who is never heard of again after the first chapter. Although Quixano is usually a rational man, in keeping with the humoral physiology theory of the time, not sleeping adequately, because he was reading, has caused his brain to dry; Quixano's temperament is thus choleric, the hot and dry humor. As a result, he is easily given to anger and believes every word of these fictional books of chivalry to be true. Imitating the protagonists of these books, he decides to become a knight errant in search of adventure.