Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Alcalá de Henares, September 29, 1547 - 
Madrid, April 22, 1616)was a Spanish soldier, novelist, poet and playwright.

He is considered the greatest figure in Spanish literature and is universally known for 
having written Don Quixote de la Mancha, which many critics have described as the first 
modern novel and one of the greatest works of world literature. It is also the most 
published and translated book in history, second only to the Bible. He has been nicknamed 
the "Prince of Wits."

Cervantes is highly original. Parodying a genre that was beginning to decline, such as the 
novels of chivalry, he created another extremely lively genre, the polyphonic novel, where
 worldviews and points of view overlap until they become complex with reality itself, even 
resorting to metafictional games. At the time,

The epic could also be written in prose, and with the precedent in the theater of Lope de 
Vega's lack of respect for classical models, it fell to him, in short, to forge the formula
of realism in narrative as it had been foreshadowed in Spain by an entire literary 
tradition since the Song of My Cid, offering it to Europe, where Cervantes had more
disciples than in Spain. The entire realist novel of the 19th century is marked by this 
mastery. On the other hand, another great masterpiece of Cervantes, the Novels

specimens, demonstrates the breadth of his spirit and his desire to experiment with 
narrative structures. In this collection of novels, the author experiments with the 
Byzantine novel (The English Spanish Woman), the detective or crime novel (The Force of 
Blood, The Jealous Extremadura), Lucian-esque dialogue (The Colloquy of the Dogs), the 
miscellany of sayings and witticisms (The Licentiate Vidriera), the picaresque novel 
(Rinconete and Cortadillo), the narrative constructed on an anagnorisis (The Gypsy Girl), 
etc.