Don Quixote

An elderly gentleman reads too many chivalric romances, decides the age of knights is not over, and rides out with a farmer for a squire. Cervantes wrote the first part in his fifties after losing the use of a hand at Lepanto and spending five years as a slave in Algiers; when a rival published a fake sequel, he wrote the real one and killed his hero so nobody could steal him again. Both parts are...