Dale Wasserman

Dale Wasserman was a self-educated American dramatist — he left school early and rode freight trains before finding his way into theatre — who wrote two enduringly popular stage adaptations: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Man of La Mancha. He was firm that Man of La Mancha was never an adaptation of Cervantes’s novel; it dramatises Cervantes himself, imprisoned and defending his story. Which makes the misattribution a small joke at his expense: his best-known sentence is one almost nobody knows he wrote.