Introduction

This is the story that a Nobel Prize Committee survey of one hundred of the world's best writers named "the greatest book of all time." DON QUIXOTE is the biggest-selling book of fiction ever written. It has sold more than 500 million copies.

"There is nothing more profound or powerful than this piece of fiction. It is still the finest and greatest expression of human thought, the most bitter irony that a man is capable of uttering." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"DON QUIXOTE looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through its sheer vitality." - Vladimir Nabokov

"The highest creation of genius has been achieved by Shakespeare and Cervantes, almost alone." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"What a monument is this book. How its creative genius, critical, free and human, soars above its age." - Thomas Mann