To reach out through the classics to the pulps, to sci-fi, to television, to daytime soaps and fake news and celebrity tabloids and recognize that all this oversaturation is just layers of stories on stories, all of which can be traced back to one determined hidalgo’s quest, over four hundred years ago. Now, imagine if we could flip that tree over and grow those shoots back into a single stalk - if there were a way to capture all the tales that emerged from Cervantes’s tome and smoosh them back into a single book. Don Quixote is the base of a colossal tree, endlessly limbing. Conceptualize now the impact these figures have on literature today, and one begins to see the breadth of Cervantes’s reach. Over the next centuries, its impact can be traced through literature around the world, seen in the work of Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Gustave Flaubert, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, to name a few major figures. A picaresque novel about a mad knight errant and his squire Sancho Panza, Don Quixote is hailed by most literary scholars as the first Western novel and the most influential novel in history. Consider it Patient Zero, or Pandora’s Box: all of Western Literature can arguably be traced back to Cervantes’s 1605/1615 masterpiece Don Quixote.
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