Monday is “Grab Bag” day here at Entertainment Legends Revealed, with each Monday featuring a different area of the world of arts and entertainment (that is not featured on the other four days of the week, that is). They’ll eventually repeat, but for now, we’re still on the initial installments of each of the various “Grab Bag” legends!

This is the first in a series of examinations of legends related to novels and their authors and whether they are true or false.

Let’s begin!

NOVEL LEGEND: Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote while in prison.

STATUS: False, with a Tinge of Truth

Don Quixote, or as it was originally titled, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, is likely the most famous novel in the history of Spanish literature.

The story follows a man in the latter part of his life who has become obsessed with the ideas of chivalry and knighthood, even when said ideas seem to contradict reality itself. Along with his faithful “squire,” Sancho Panza, Don Quixote goes on a series of “quests” that proceed from the farcical to the tragic as the book goes along.

Written in two volumes over a ten year period (1605 for the first release, 1615 for volume two - the book is now typically read as one volume with two parts), Miguel de Cervantes’ novel is considered an absolute masterpiece of Western literature.

Here is a portrait of Cervantes…

There have been many stories written about the background of Don Quixote and the life of Miguel de Cervantes, but perhaps the most popular is one that was given a great deal of legitimacy when it was written into the book for the musical, Man of La Mancha.

The musical (music and lyrics by Joe Darion and Mitch Leigh)’s book was written by Dale Wasserman (based on Wasserman’s play, I, Don Quixote). It opens with Cervantes in a debtor’s prison. He proceeds to basically act out the story of Don Quixote to the other prisoners and at the end of the musical, we learn that the manuscript that he has been so protective of the whole musical is, of course, the manuscript for Don Quixote.

Wasserman is basing his story on a real-life incident in Cervantes’ life. Cervantes was born in 1547, and after an extended stay in the military (he served in the Spanish navy, where he served proudly and was shot three times - his wounds resulted in his left arm being amputated when he was 33). A few years later, while on another enterpise, Cervantes was on a ship that was captured by pirates. He was held as a slave in Algiers for five years until his parents ransomed him free.

He would marry in 1584, and for the next twenty years he would work as a tax collector and a purchasing agent for the Spanish Armada. He went bankrupt and was put into prison at least twice (1597 and 1602) for his debts, failing to find any loans to keep him out of the clink (I guess we know why people use credit reports and loan consolidation nowadays, huh? That way you don’t have to worry about being thrown in jail for your debts!).

According to Cervantes (or at least, a comment made by Cervantes in the text of Don Quixote), the IDEA for Don Quixote DID come to him while he was in prison in 1602, but he did not start working on the novel for quite some time after he was out of prison. The idea that struck him in prison was to write a novel about “normal” people, written in plain language.

In any event, the idea that Cervantes had any or all of Don Quixote written while he was in prison is incorrect, so the status of this legend is false.

NOVEL LEGEND: Pamela began originally as basically a self-help book.

STATUS: True

What we now know as “self-help” books really have their root in the middle ages in what was called a “conduct book.”

Conduct books were books that were written in various forms (sermons, manuals, devotional writings). One of the more popular form were epistolary letters, that is, an instruction manual written in the form of familiar letters. Something along the lines of, “Dear Reader, you should always floss before you go to bed” - only with some more flowery speech and without any reference to modern oral hygiene.

So when Samuel Richardson sat down to come up with a work where he could instill in young ladies the virtues of remaining chaste, he began to do the work as a conduct book in the form of letters. However, after beginning the work, the idea came upon him - in doing a series of letters, he effectively was creating a character, was he not? Then why not use this character to tell a STORY, while still getting across the whole “Keep your pants on and you will go far in this world” message? The idea of novels were still fairly new when Richardson began his work in 1740 (well, 1740 was when it was published - he may have begun working on it a year earlier), so the idea behind turning the work into a novel was, well, novel.

Here’s a portrait of Richardson…

In 1740, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, was released to widespread acclaim and success.

The novel tells the story (via her letters) of Pamela, a young girl who goes to work as a live-in maid for a fellow who keeps making advances on her. She continues to ward off his advances, and eventually, he is so impressed with her virtue that he proposes marriage. They wed, and the rest of the novel is Pamela adjusting to suddenly becoming part of high society.

The legendary author, Henry Fielding, put out a brilliant parody of the novel the next year, titled An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, where he reveals that “Pamela” is really a con artist trying to snare her boss in marriage.

In any event, yes, Pamela originally began as a self-help book, basically. Imagine if it came out today? It could be called An Idiot’s Guide to Virtue!

NOVEL LEGEND: Robert B. Parker created a popular series of novels just so an actress could have a good role - a role she never ended up playing.

STATUS: True

Robert B. Parker (born 1932) has been writing novels since 1971.

His most famous series of novels star the Boston private eye known as Spenser.

Spenser was so popular that he received his own TV series called Spenser for Hire, starring Robert Urich and Avery Brooks (whose character, Hawk, had a spin-off series after Spenser for Hire).

The show lasted three seasons from 1985-1988, and also had a series of TV movies in the 1990s.

One of Parker’s current lead characters is the female detective Sunny Randall, also a Boston P.I.

The character has appeared in seven novels since her debut in 1999’s Family Honor (most recently, 2007’s Spare Change).

Randall had an odd genesis, though.

In an interview with the bookreporter.com in 2000, Parker responded to a question about Randall by suggesting that her creation was motivated by “greed.”

The Book Reporter: Greed works! It’s a great motivator!

Parker: Yes! What happened was that Joan and I were in Los Angeles in 1997. I received a call from John Calley, the CEO of SONY Pictures, who wanted to know if I would be interested in listening to a proposal. It seemed that Helen Hunt wanted a female Spenser-type character to be used as a vehicle for her production company for one or more movies. Joan and I met with John, Helen, and Amy Pascal, who was President of Columbia Pictures at the time, in John’s office on the old MGM lot in what used to be Louie Meyer’s office. I won’t pretend that Joan and I are so sophisticated that we were not impressed by being picked up in a limousine and transported to a movie lot which is full of history and sitting in on a meeting like that! Anyway, I entered into an agreement with Ms. Hunt’s production company, and Sunny Randall was created soon thereafter. I wrote FAMILY HONOR and a film based on the book is in the planning stage, though I am not entirely sure what is happening with it at this point. My publisher, however, liked FAMILY HONOR and asked for more. The result of that is PERISH TWICE. What I will be doing is writing a new Spenser novel annually, to be published each spring. I will alternate in the fall between a Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone novel. This year it will be Sunny Randall in PERISH TWICE; I’ll publish a new Jesse Stone novel in fall 2001.

The movie was never made, so Parker created a series for an actress that never actually got to play the character!

Funny how things work out that way.

Thanks to the bookreporter.com for the great interview!

Okay, that’s it for this week!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments, particularly other themes for future grab bag Mondays! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com