Writing 1

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (BIOGRAPHY)

from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Miguel-de-Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes, in full Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, (born

September 29?, 1547, Alcalá de Henares, Spain—died April 22, 1616,
Madrid), Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet, the creator of Don
Quixote (1605, 1615) and the most important and celebrated figure in Spanish
literature. His novel Don Quixote has been translated, in full or in part, into
more than 60 languages. Editions continue regularly to be printed, and critical
discussion of the work has proceeded unabated since the 18th century. At the
same time, owing to their widespread representation in art, drama, and film, the
figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are probably familiar visually to more
people than any other imaginary characters in world literature. Cervantes was a
great experimenter. He tried his hand in all the major literary genres save
the epic. He was a notable short-story writer, and a few of those in his collection
of Novelas exemplares (1613; Exemplary Stories) attain a level close to that
of Don Quixote, on a miniature scale.
Cervantes was born some 20 miles (32 km) from Madrid, probably on
September 29 (the day of San Miguel). He was certainly baptized on October 9.
He was the fourth of seven children in a family whose origins were of the minor
gentry but which had come down in the world. His father was a barber-surgeon
who set bones, performed bloodlettings, and attended lesser medical needs. The
family moved from town to town, and little is known of Cervantes’s early
education. The supposition, based on a passage in one of the Exemplary Stories,
that he studied for a time under the Jesuits, though not unlikely, remains
conjectural. Unlike most Spanish writers of his time, including some of humble
origin, he apparently did not go to a university. What is certain is that at some
stage he became an avid reader of books. The head of a municipal school in
Madrid, a man with Erasmist intellectual leanings named Juan López de Hoyos,
refers to a Miguel de Cervantes as his “beloved pupil.” This was in 1569, when
the future author was 21, so—if this was the same Cervantes—he must either
have been a pupil-teacher at the school or have studied earlier under López de
Hoyos. His first published poem, on the death of Philip II’s young queen,
Elizabeth of Valois, appeared at this time.
Soldier And Slave

That same year he left Spain for Italy. Whether this was because he was the
“student” of the same name wanted by the law for involvement in a wounding
incident is another mystery; the evidence is contradictory. In any event, in going
to Italy Cervantes was doing what many young Spaniards of the time did to
further their careers in one way or another. It seems that for a time he served as
chamberlain in the household of Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva in Rome. However,
by 1570 he had enlisted as a soldier in a Spanish infantry regiment stationed
in Naples, then a possession of the Spanish crown. He was there for about a year
before he saw active service.
Relations with the Ottoman Empire under Selim II were reaching a crisis, and
the Turks occupied Cyprus in 1570. A confrontation between the Turkish fleet
and the naval forces of Venice, the papacy, and Spain was inevitable. In mid-
September 1571 Cervantes sailed on board the Marquesa, part of the large fleet
under the command of Don Juan de Austria that engaged the enemy on October
7 in the Gulf of Lepanto near Corinth. The fierce battle ended in a crushing
defeat for the Turks that was ultimately to break their control of the
Mediterranean. There are independent accounts of Cervantes’s conduct in the
action, and they concur in testifying to his personal courage. Though stricken
with a fever, he refused to stay below and joined the thick of the fighting. He
received two gunshot wounds in the chest, and a third rendered his left hand
useless for the rest of his life. He always looked back on his conduct in the battle
with pride. From 1572 to 1575, based mainly in Naples, he continued his
soldier’s life; he was at Navarino and saw action in Tunis and La Goleta. He
must also, when opportunity offered, have been familiarizing himself
with Italian literature. Perhaps with a recommendation for promotion to the
rank of captain, more likely just leaving the army, he set sail for Spain in
September 1575 with letters of commendation to the king from the duque de
Sessa and Don Juan himself.
On this voyage his ship was attacked and captured by Barbary pirates, and
Cervantes, together with his brother Rodrigo, was sold into slavery in Algiers,
the centre of the Christian slave traffic in the Muslim world. The letters he
carried magnified his importance in the eyes of his captors. This had the effect
of raising his ransom price, and thus prolonging his captivity, while also, it
appears, protecting his person from punishment by death, mutilation, or torture
when his four daring bids to escape were frustrated. His masters,
the renegade Dali Mami and later Hasan Paşa, treated him with considerable
leniency in the circumstances, whatever the reason. At least two contemporary
records of the life led by Christian captives in Algiers at this time mention
Cervantes. He clearly made a name for himself for courage and leadership
among the captive community. At long last, in September 1580, three years after
Rodrigo had earned his freedom, Miguel’s family, with the aid and intervention
of the Trinitarian friars, raised the 500 gold escudos demanded for his release.
It was only just in time, right before Hasan Paşa sailed for Constantinople (now
Istanbul), taking his unsold slaves with him. Not surprisingly, this, the most
adventurous period of Cervantes’s life, supplied subject matter for several of his
literary works, notably the Captive’s tale in Don Quixote and the two Algiers
plays, El trato de Argel (“The Traffic of Algiers”) and Los baños de Argel (“The
Bagnios [an obsolete word for “prisons”] of Algiers”), as well as episodes in a
number of other writings, although never in straight autobiographical form.

Civil Servant And Writer

Back in Spain, Cervantes spent most of the rest of his life in a manner that
contrasted entirely with his decade of action and danger. He would be
constantly short of money and in tedious and exacting employment; it would be
25 years before he scored a major literary success with Don Quixote. On his
return home he found that prices had risen and the standard of living for many,
particularly those of the middle class, including his family, had fallen. The
euphoria of Lepanto was a thing of the past. Cervantes’s war record did not now
bring the recompense he expected. He applied unsuccessfully for several
administrative posts in Spain’s American empire. The most he succeeded in
acquiring was a brief appointment as royal messenger to Oran, Algeria, in 1581.
In vain he followed Philip II and the court to Lisbon in newly annexed Portugal.
About this time he had an affair with a young married woman named Ana de
Villafranca (or Ana Franca de Rojas), the fruit of which was a daughter. Isabel
de Saavedra, Cervantes’s only child, was later brought up in her father’s
household. Late in 1584 he married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, 18 years his
junior. She had a small property in the village of Esquivias in La Mancha. Little
is known about their emotional relationship. There is no reason to suppose that
the marriage did not settle down into an adequate companionableness, despite
Cervantes’s enforced long absences from home. Neither is there any special
reason to suppose that Catalina was an inspiration or a model for characters in
the poetry Cervantes was now writing or in his first published fiction, La
Galatea (1585; Galatea: A Pastoral Romance), in the newly
fashionable genre of the pastoral romance. The publisher, Blas de Robles, paid
him 1,336 reales for it, a good price for a first book. The dedication of the work
to Ascanio Colonna, a friend of Acquaviva, was a bid for patronage that does not
seem to have been productive. Doubtless helped by a small circle of literary
friends, such as the poet Luis Gálvez de Montalvo, the book did bring
Cervantes’s name before a sophisticated reading public. But the only later
editions in Spanish to appear in the author’s lifetime were those of Lisbon, 1590,
and Paris, 1611. La Galatea breaks off in mid-narrative; judging by his
repeatedly expressed hopes of writing a sequel, Cervantes evidently maintained
a lasting fondness for the work.
Cervantes also turned his hand to the writing of drama at this time, the early
dawn of the Golden Age of the Spanish theatre. He contracted to write two plays
for the theatrical manager Gaspar de Porras in 1585, one of which, La
confusa (“Confusion”), he later described as the best he ever wrote. Many years
afterward he claimed to have written 20 or 30 plays in this period, which, he
noted, were received by the public without being booed off the stage or having
the actors pelted with vegetables. The number is vague; only two certainly
survive from this time, the historical tragedy of La
Numancia (1580s; Numantia: A Tragedy) and El trato de Argel (1580s; “The
Traffic of Algiers”). He names nine plays, the titles of a few of which sound like
the originals of plays reworked and published years later in the collection Ocho
comedias, y ocho entremeses nuevos (1615; “Eight Plays and Eight New
Interludes”). Fixed theatre sites were just becoming established in the major
cities of Spain, and there was an expanding market geared to satisfying the
demands of a public ever more hungry for entertainment. Lope de Vega was
about to respond to the call, stamping his personal imprint on the
Spanish comedia and rendering all earlier drama, including that of Cervantes,
old-fashioned or inadequate by comparison. Though destined to be a
disappointed dramatist, Cervantes went on trying to get managers to accept his
stage works. By 1587 it was clear that he was not going to make a living
from literature, and he was obliged to turn in a very different direction.
Cervantes became a commissary of provisions for the great Armada.
Requisitioning corn and oil from grudging rural communities was a thankless
task, but it was at least a steady job, with a certain status. It took him traveling
all over Andalusia, an experience he was to put to good use in his writing. He
was responsible for finances of labyrinthine complexity, and the failure to
balance his books landed him in prolonged and repeated trouble with his
superiors. There also was constant argument with municipal and church
authorities, the latter of which more than once excommunicated him. The
surviving documentation of the accountancy and negotiations involved is
considerable.
After the disastrous defeat of the Armada in 1588, Cervantes gravitated
to Sevilla (Seville), the commercial capital of Spain and one of the largest cities
in Europe. In 1590 he applied to the Council of the Indies for any one of four
major crown posts vacant in Central and South America. His petition was curtly
rejected. Wrangles over his accounts and arrears of salary dragged on. He seems
to have kept some contact with the literary world; there is a record of his buying
certain books, and he must have managed to find time for reading. In 1592 he
signed a contract to supply six plays to a theatrical manager, one Rodrigo
Osorio. Nothing came of this. His commissary work continued, and the
litigation came to a head; in September 1592 he was imprisoned for a few days
in Castro del Río.
In 1594 Cervantes was in Madrid seeking a new post. He received an
appointment that took him back to Andalusia to collect overdue taxes. Although
it was in effect a promotion, the job was no more rewarding than the previous
one and was similarly fraught with financial difficulties and confrontations.
Cervantes was not by temperament a businessman. Probably by mutual
agreement the appointment was terminated in 1596. The previous year he had
won first prize (three silver spoons) in a poetry competition in Zaragoza. Back in
Sevilla, he likely started seriously writing stories at about this time, not to
mention a wickedly satirical sonnet on the conduct of the duque de Medina
Sidonia, to be followed by one obliquely disrespectful of the recently deceased
king himself. Again he met with financial troubles. In the summer of 1597
discrepancies in his accounts of three years previous landed him in the Crown
Jail of Sevilla. He was confined until the end of April 1598 and perhaps
conceived there the idea of Don Quixote, as a remark in the first prologue
suggests:
And so, what was to be expected of a sterile and uncultivated wit such as that
which I possess if not an offspring that was dried up, shriveled, and eccentric:
a story filled with thoughts that never occurred to anyone else, of a sort that
might be engendered in a prison where every annoyance has its home and
every mournful sound its habitation?
Information about Cervantes’s life over the next four or five years is sparse. He
had left Sevilla, and, perhaps for a while in Esquivias and Madrid, later for
certain in Valladolid (where the royal court established itself from 1601 to
1606), he must have been writing the first part of Don Quixote. Early versions of
two of his stories, Rinconete y Cortadillo (“Rinconete and Cortadillo”) and El
celoso extremeño (“The Jealous Extremaduran”), found their way into a
miscellaneous compilation, unpublished, made by one Francisco Porras de la
Cámara.

Publication Of Don Quixote

In July or August 1604 Cervantes sold the rights of El ingenioso hidalgo don
Quijote de la Mancha (“The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha,”
known as Don Quixote, Part I) to the publisher-bookseller Francisco de Robles
for an unknown sum. License to publish was granted in September and the book
came out in January 1605. There is some evidence of its content’s being known
or known about before publication—to, among others, Lope de Vega,
the vicissitudes of whose relations with Cervantes were then at a low point. The
compositors at Juan de la Cuesta’s press in Madrid are now known to have been
responsible for a great many errors in the text, many of which were long
attributed to the author.
 Summary Paragraph
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was the biggest figure of spanish literature for
his famous novels, he got his expertise on writing by writing poems since he
was young, then in his youth he got involved in a legal trouble and he had to
scape so he had to give service in the spanish army and move to a war in Italy
where he could assimilate the italian literatura in that place he participated in
the Lepanto battle in that place he losed the left hand by a shot then when he
was returning to Spain some pirates kidnapped him for some years, his life was
hard but he had persistence and determination and start writing some books
like La confusa, La Numancia, El trato de Argel, etc. And after many years of
hard work he wrote “El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha” which is
his most famous book after this succes he got fame in all Spain and the world,
In conclusion Cervantes got succes and fame in his art because was persistant
and never give up even when he was in worse moments.