Miguel de Cervantes

Cervantes lived the adventures his hero only imagined: maimed at the naval battle of Lepanto, captured by Barbary pirates, five years a slave in Algiers with four failed escape attempts, then home to prison stints over tangled tax accounts. Don Quixote was begun, by his own account, in jail: a weathered veteran's last bid to sell some pages.

The parody outgrew its target within chapters. Part One (1605) made him famous across Europe without making him rich; a decade later, Part Two answered its own bootleg sequel by folding the fraud into the fiction: characters who have read Part One meet the knight and measure him against his legend. The novel learned to be about itself in its second-ever installment.

He died in April 1616, the same week as Shakespeare, still a step ahead of every experiment the form has tried since.