Novel Friendships and Community in Cervantes's "Don Quixote" analyzes Don Quixote through the critical lens of friendship studies. Turning a critical spotlight on the friendship of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, this book examines the formation, growth, and dynamics of their friendship as the nucleus of the first modern novel in the West and the source of the work's enduring power. Novel Friendships also studies the theme of amity in relationship to the evolving concept of community as a throughline in Cervantes's fiction in, before, and after Don Quixote . This book shows the power of the arts, especially storytelling, to build friendships and community, and highlights how Cervantes deploys fiction to cultivate his readers' friendship and create a community of readers. Novel Friendships suggests how today's readers may find that Cervantes's views on amity and community prove relevant to our contemporary world.