Charles William Eliot

Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de la Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they wend their way across sixteenth-century Spain.

Although published nearly 400 years ago in Spanish, this parody of the chivalrous life remains amazingly familiar in translation today-perhaps from the extensive influence it has played on novelists, playwrights and even composers over the centuries, or perhaps from its eternal story of the childlike and comic view of a decayed world by a madman stuck in a golden past.