Don Quijote

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcala de Henares, Spain, in 1547. In 1585, a few months after his marriage to Catalina de Salazar, he published his first major work as an author, the pastoral novel La Galatea which was poorly received. Cervantes became a tax collector in Granada in 1594, but was imprisoned in 1597 due to money problems with the government. Folklore maintains that while in prison, he wrote his most famous novel, Don Quixote, which was an immediate success upon publication in 1605. After several years of writing short novels and plays, Cervantes was spurred to write the sequel to Don Quixote in 1615 when an unauthorized sequel appeared to great acclaim. Though Cervantes' sequel was rushed and flawed, Don Quixote remains a powerful symbol that has endured to present times in many forms. Cervantes died on April 22, 1616, at the age of 69.

Thomas Albert Lathrop was born in Los Angeles, California. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish and French, a master's degree in Spanish literature, and a Ph.D in romance linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. He began writing Spanish textbooks while working towards his Ph.D. During his lifetime, he taught at several colleges and universities including the University of Delaware, where he was a professor of romance languages from 1980 until retiring in 2006. He wrote more than 15 books including The Evolution of Spanish. He edited a number of editions of Spanish and French classics for English speaking readers, including Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote. He also founded and was editor of two publishing companies: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs and Linguatext Ltd. He received the Order of Don Quixote award and was named Oficial en la Orden de Isabel la Catolica by the King of Spain. He died on February 17, 2014 at the age of 72.