Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra was born in Alcal of Henares in 1547. He was a novelist, playwright, and poet-criticized by himself-considered as one, if not the greatest Spanish language writer of all time, even though he never studied at a university. Don Quixote is his best known work which has transcended nations, cultures, languages, epochs and times. Cervantes has been read by children and adults, men and housewives, rich and poor. He described his own portrait by writing: 'of an aquiline face, brown hair...with a silver beard that twenty years early was a golden one.'The hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha wishes to cleanse the world of scoundrels, talkative and goofy: Did he achieve it? Even today he is doing it because although it is utopian to think that human strength can reach such step, he learned to transcend the times and bring us that unequivocal victory while denouncing and trying to introduce some bravery inside our reasoning.We cannot look at the characters of Sancho and Don Quixote as a mere souls' contradiction of the one same people, in this case Spain. They actually complement each other in a kind of literary marriage: one wants justice, shared base of any society and reports it through his ideals, the other is practical as he wants to see them in reality; but two: the announcer and corroborator, are both active in their impeachment.

This catalogue and the exhibit which it commemorates features 45 books from the Eduardo Urbina Cervantes Project Collection in the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A & M University. The catalogue and exhibit coincide with?Don Quixote Illustrated: Textual Images and Visual Readings,? a two-day symposium on Cervantes drawing on scholars from around the world and timed to help celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Quixote. The Cervantes collection now contains over 350 editions of or relating to Don Quixote.