Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) was wounded at the naval battle of Lepanto, spent five years enslaved in Algiers after capture by corsairs, and was imprisoned in Spain over accounting debts before publishing the first part of Don Quixote in 1605. It is commonly called the first modern novel, and much of its comedy comes from a device still in use: the second part is set in a world where the characters have read the first. The advice Don Quixote gives Sancho before his governorship is genuinely sound, which is the joke — it comes from a man who cannot see himself clearly at all.