DON QUIXOTE IN THE AMERICAN MIND

Ilan Stavans, Quixote: The Novel and the World (New York & London: Norton, 2015) ("The Founding Fathers, in their eighteenth-century quest for a nation where everyone would be entitled to a decent life, where liberty and the pursuit of happiness would be the central tenets, saw in Cervantes's hero an ideal. The belief that the United States needed to be a bastion of tolerance and individualism, a place where people would be free to engage in quests of the imagination, led these political leaders to embrace Don Quixote as their own advisor." Id. at 146.).