Quixotic Quests: Salvador Dalí’s First Illustrated Don Quixote

Salvador Dalí illustrated Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote for the first time while living in exile in the United States in the 1940s, collaborating with Random House to produce a special edition that was published in 1946. Quixotic Quests examines the material history of this 1946 edition by bridging art history, book history, literature, and narratology, while exploring Dalí’s role as its illustrator and the reception of both by mid-century popular culture, art historians, and literary scholars.

Positing that much of Dalí’s life was quixotic in nature, the book investigates his quest to illustrate the novel with an unprecedented level of pictorial didacticism, despite challenges that the artist and Random House faced during and after the Second World War. It details his resolute passion to integrate surrealism with classicism, visual art with narrative, sexuality with sublimation, and privacy with public persona. Contrasting Dalí’s visual achievements with other artists and stylistic movements, Quixotic Quests sheds new light on the niche that Dalí created for himself as a surrealist illustrator of Don Quixote. Consulting his autobiographical narratives, the book analyses Dalí’s unique artistic contributions to the four-hundred-year print history of the novel, while emphasizing the artist’s heartfelt appreciation and respect for his book illustrations.

Daniel Holcombe is an associate professor of Spanish at Georgia College & State University.