Origins of the Novel

For a hundred years, prose fiction has one job: convince you it isn't fiction. A knight who's read too many romances, a castaway insisting his diary is real, a thief telling her own life story so persuasively you stop checking it: the novel invents itself by pretending, very hard, not to be inventing anything.

1. 1
   Don Quixote

   Miguel de Cervantes · 1605

   Lvl 6940pp

   The founding act: Cervantes takes the old chivalric romance so seriously it becomes a joke, and the joke becomes the first novel.

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2. 2
   Paradise Lost

   John Milton · 1667

   Lvl 8300pp

   The old epic mode makes one last towering stand alongside the new form: Milton's Satan is more interesting than his God, and prose fiction is taking notes.

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3. 3
   A Tale of a Tub

   Jonathan Swift · 1704

   Lvl 8180pp

   Swift turns a treatise-about-a-treatise inside out: satire limbering up the digressive, self-interrupting muscles the novel will need.

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4. 4
   Robinson Crusoe

   Daniel Defoe · 1719

   Lvl 4304pp

   Defoe's castaway insists, in flat, convincing first-person prose, that every word of this is true. It isn't, and the lie is the whole invention.

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5. 5
   Moll Flanders

   Daniel Defoe · 1722

   Lvl 5368pp

   The capstone: Defoe's most morally slippery narrator yet, a thief and survivor who makes her own case so well you stop cross-examining it. The novel has learned to lie fluently.

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