Don Quixote

A man reads so many chivalric romances that he decides to become a knight. He names himself Don Quixote de la Mancha, recruits a bewildered neighbor as his squire, and rides out to do battle with the forces of evil — which turn out to be windmills, flocks of sheep, and a barber's basin he mistakes for a golden helmet. Cervantes published this in 1605 as a direct satire of the adventure story tradition that had convinced a generation of Spanish readers that knight errantry was a model for living — and produced the first modern novel and the most complete literary argument ever made that the stories we tell ourselves about the world are more dangerous than the world itself. Every satirist from Voltaire to Vonnegut to Snicket learned something from how this works. The foundational text of the entire Laugh & Resist shelf — the book that first understood that following a dangerous narrative to its logical conclusion is more devastating than arguing against it directly.