Author Description

<p>In the early seventeenth century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from reading too many books of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That book, <i>Don Quixote</i>, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history. Cervantes did more than just publish a bestseller, though. He invented a way of writing. This book is about how Cervantes came to create what we now call fiction, and how fiction changed the world. <br><br> <i>The Man Who Invented Fiction</i> explores Cervantes's life and the world he lived in, showing how his influences converged in his work, and how his work--especially <i>Don Quixote</i>--radically changed the nature of literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, it explains how that worldview went on to infiltrate art, politics, and science, and how the world today would be unthinkable without it.<br><br> Four hundred years after Cervantes's death, William Egginton has brought thrilling new meaning to an immortal novel.</p>