Who wrote the 1742 English novel Joseph Andrews, influenced by Don Quixote?

Henry Fielding wrote the 1742 English novel Joseph Andrews, a work influenced by Don Quixote.

The book’s full title is The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams. It follows Joseph, a good-natured footman, and the absent-minded parson Abraham Adams on a journey from London. Fielding presents the novel as a comic and episodic adventure rather than a conventional solemn romance.

Fielding openly acknowledged Cervantes’s influence. The title page describes Joseph Andrews as written in imitation of the manner of the author of Don Quixote, and the novel uses digressions, contrasting characters, comic reversals, and picaresque travel in ways that recall Cervantes. Fielding famously called his form a “comic epic poem in prose.”

Joseph Andrews began partly as a response to Samuel Richardson’s hugely popular Pamela, but it developed into an independent novel with its own social criticism and humor. It was published in 1742 and is regarded as Fielding’s first full-length novel. A frequent mix-up is to credit Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy appeared later; Sterne was another major eighteenth-century novelist, not the author of Joseph Andrews.