The adventures of Don Quixote, the famous knight errant, and his lady-love, Dulcinea del Toboso that Miguel de Cervantes portrays in his epic novel, "The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha"; and made more famous by countless adaptations featured in movies and theatrical musical productions of that singular masterpiece reflective of the human condition has captured the imagination of generations throughout the world. "Don Quixote's Impossible Dream: To Everyman His Dulcinea", by David P. Grzan, has elevated the notion of chivalric love, in the fairest terms, which Don Quixote advanced to the honor and esteem of Dulcinea, his true love, the quest of his impossible dream. Love, the most powerful force in the universe, has been the primary inspiration that has propelled all the Don Quixote's, known and unknown that have ever lived, in their attempt to accomplish great deeds in the name of their particular Dulcinea. This epic poem immortalizes the triumphs, tragedies, obstacles, struggles and courage that can accompany and at other times can thwart the greatest of all prizes, love, in the context of the infinite profoundness and complexity of the human dynamic, which is sublimely represented and exemplified by the relationship between Don Quixote and Dulcinea.

The adventures of Don Quixote, the famous knight errant, and his lady-love, Dulcinea del Toboso that Miguel de Cervantes portrays in his epic novel, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha; and made more famous by countless adaptations featured in movies and theatrical musical productions of that singular masterpiece reflective of the human condition has captured the imagination of generations throughout the world. Don Quixotes Impossible Dream: To Everyman His Dulcinea, by David P. Grzan, has elevated the notion of chivalric love, in the fairest terms, which Don Quixote advanced to the honor and esteem of Dulcinea, his true love, the quest of his impossible dream. Love, the most powerful force in the universe, has been the primary inspiration that has propelled all the Don Quixotes, known and unknown that have ever lived, in their attempt to accomplish great deeds in the name of their particular Dulcinea. This epic poem immortalizes the triumphs, tragedies, obstacles, struggles and courage that can accompany and at other times can thwart the greatest of all prizes, love, in the context of the infinite profoundness and complexity of the human dynamic, which is sublimely represented and exemplified by the relationship between Don Quixote and Dulcinea.

Dale Wasserman had more trouble getting it on to a Broadway stage than Don Quixote ever had with those windmills.

Winner of the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Musical, 1966 "To me the most interesting aspect of the success of Man of La Mancha is the fact that it plows squarely upstream against the prevailing current of philosophy in the theater. That current is best identified by its catch-labels--Theater of the Absurd, Black Comedy, the Theater of Cruelty--which is to say the theater of alienation, of moral anarchy and despair. To the practitioners of those philosophies Man of La Mancha must seem hopelessly naive in its espousal of illusion as man's strongest spiritual need, the most meaningful function of his imagination. But I've no unhappiness about that. "Facts are the enemy of truth," says Cervantes-Don Quixote. And that is precisely what I felt and meant."--Dale Wasserman, from the Preface.

"It was the Exemplary Novels, published three years before his death ... that established Cervantes' literary reputation among the intellectuals of his time. These picaresque stories ring with racy idiom and peasant humor, and with explicit characterizations that show how well he knew the speech and folkways and psychology of the common people. Among the Exemplary Novels presented here are three of his most famous ones: The Deceitful Marriage, a cynical tale of Spanish domestic life, merciless in its realism, pungent in its humor; The Little Gypsy, a love story of a high-spirited girl whose haunting counterpart has reappeared in the works of Goethe and Victor Hugo; and The Dogs' Colloquy, judged by many critics to be the greatest short story ever written."--Page 4 of cover.

A groundbreaking cultural history of the most influential, most frequently translated, and most imitated novel in the world. The year 2015 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the complete Don Quixote of La Mancha—an ageless masterpiece that has proven unusually fertile and endlessly adaptable. Flaubert was inspired to turn Emma Bovary into “a knight in skirts.” Freud studied Quixote’s psyche. Mark Twain was fascinated by it, as were Kafka, Picasso, Nabokov, Borges, and Orson Welles. The novel has spawned ballets and operas, poems and plays, movies and video games, and even shapes the identities of entire nations. Spain uses it as a sort of constitution and travel guide; and the Americas were conquered, then sought their independence, with the knight as a role model. In Quixote, Ilan Stavans, one of today’s preeminent cultural commentators, explores these many manifestations. Training his eye on the tumultuous struggle between logic and dreams, he reveals the ways in which a work of literature is a living thing that influences and is influenced by the world around it.