Don Quixote — Cervantes

Don Quixote, the 50-year-old hidalgo who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and sets out to be a knight errant in a world of windmills and inn-keepers, is the first great character in the history of the European novel. His delusion — believing fiction more real than reality — has made him the symbol of idealism, madness, the power of narrative to shape perception, and the pathos of obsolescence.